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Rant: My recent experience of trying to install windows for gaming and why I'm really thankful for Linux

I thought I’d chuck windows on my gaming laptop an Acer nitro 5 from last year, to see how it’s going do some bits I can’t on Linux VR, certain multiplayer games etc.

What a disaster! I’ve spent the whole day brute forcing drivers and generally dicking about trying to get my setup sorted.

Upon installation, Wi-Fi drivers don’t exist, so you cannot use the internet while installing if you’re on Wi-Fi. Mint’s had this since what 2006? But that’s cool, Cortana is here to chat away and not understand any requests. Once finally in the OS after 20 questions that could be considered harassment if it was a person, nothing was ready to go. Every single driver needed sourcing and installing.

People have the cheek to complain about Linux’s Nvidia install, literally two clicks on most distros if it isn’t already baked in. Go to website find driver, download click click click agree click wait more software click click wait.

Plug in my sound card OK it’s a bit old now UA-25 but nothing happens…hmm find obscure video partially install a driver from Vista then cancel the installation program so you can side load a driver from 8,1 but wait there’s more disable core isolation to allow the driver to work reboot into a now slightly more compromised OS.

OK plug in wheel again not new stuff G25 oh it works cool. Oh, no H-shifter OK download driver. “Can’t find device, ensure it’s plugged in”. Windows decided it knew better, downloaded its own driver that blocks the official one and loads a steering wheel as a gamepad…GG cool cool.

I do not understand why we still have this image that Windows is noob friendly, it’s such a convoluted obfuscated process to do anything. It does worse than nothing, it thinks it’s smart enough to carry out tasks on the user behalf and just bork it.

All of these issues are because I don’t have the new shiny things, but it really highlighted why I love Linux now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to install a distro and play on my 20-year-old peripherals

bleistift2 ,

14 days ago I tested Ubuntu. I couldn’t access my Wifi. The network was visible, but it refused to accept the password. (Yes, I quintuple-checked that I entered it right.) When I tried Linux Mint, it worked on the first try.

Moral of the story: Drivers are hit-and-miss on Linux, too.

mlg ,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

Only moral I got from this was to never use Ubuntu lmao

all hail latest kernel modules, and akmod/dkms

geoma ,

Yes. There are no reasons to use Ubuntu nowadays. If you are on that track, skip to mint or mx linux.

mlg ,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

casually puts on Fedora hat

Hupf ,

youtu.be/2kQhv7S2wxU

my_hat_stinks ,

That reminds me of an issue I had when I was installing Mint. I tried out a live boot first and everything seemed to work except there was no internet connection. Turns out my WiFi card needs a proprietary driver, but no big deal it installed easily enough just from the boot disk. Internet’s working, all looks good, so I go ahead and install Mint proper, remove the live boot usb, start the system, and savour that new Minty smell. But hang on, there’s no WiFi, I forgot to install the driver! Should be an easy enough fix though, it wasn’t hard last time.

So I go to install the driver and the first thing it says is that it needs the boot disk to get the driver. That makes total sense, can’t install something you don’t have! I plug in the usb again and now it should all be plain sailing, after all it’s just installing a driver that worked 20 minutes ago, right? Sadly no, that would be too easy; for some reason now it’s missing dependencies! Or something along those lines anyway, I forget exactly. But can’t it just install those from the boot disk? Well apparently not, it instead tries to connect to the internet to download them. This obviously fails since I don’t have a WiFi connection, which is why I’m installing the driver in the first place. All I get is a popup saying it can’t install some stuff because there’s no internet connection, fix that to get your internet connection. This is the point where face meets palm. I’m sure there’s some fiddly “proper” way to work around that but the thing is I’m incredibly lazy so I’ll just take the quick option instead. I plug in my phone and use a tethered connection. I run the install again and it finally goes through, at last the system is ready to use! It’s been mostly smooth sailing since then (though I did get annoyed enough at NTFS a couple of months ago that I just reformatted a data drive and wiped a ton of data I probably didn’t need).

Tl;dr: I had to tether to my phone for a minute. Traumatising!

nicoweio ,

Hrm, but shouldn’t Linux Mint, being based on Ubuntu, have basically the same drivers?

systemglitch ,

That’s the point he is making really. Linux has issues that Linux enthusiasts refuse to acknowledge

ARk ,

Huh? I’m all for d***riding on Linux but this is a weird case. I’ve not had a single issue with windows on gaming laptops even across multiple reinstalls. They’re all automatically installed soon after you boot. Just need to wait through a few updates.

Jtskywalker ,

Yeah I’ve never had a missing driver problem with a windows install since maybe windows 7. I even moved a hard drive with a windows 8 install from an Asus laptop with an Intel cpu to a custom build desktop with a ryzen cpu without having to change any drivers. I did have to reactivate windows because of the hardware change but that’s it.

The included drivers are often providing less performance than updated ones from the vendor though, so it is recommended to download those in some cases, specifically nvidia. But most gaming laptops will have a vendor provided update center to manage all of that for you.

I like Linux over windows for a lot of reasons but this post is a bit silly.

Lmaydev ,

Weird I’ve never had to manually install a driver for windows.

rah ,

windows

Wrong community.

savvywolf ,
@savvywolf@pawb.social avatar

I’ve installed Windows on a system I’ve built myself, and I’ve had so many problems…

Firstly, did you know what Windows doesn’t allow you to install it on a partition that isn’t the first one on the drive (under certain circumstances)? It also doesn’t give you sensible error messages that that’s the problem.

I also had to install audio drivers from the disk that came with my motherboard (the ones on the website didn’t work).

I don’t know if this was this system or some other one, but I’ve faced the whole “no network card drivers so can’t download network card drivers” issue.

Recently I made the controversial decision of booting Windows with an external drive plugged in, so it decided to reorder my device letter mappings and break a bunch of shortcuts.

And of course, there’s no resource like the arch wiki, so you’re basically left on your own to fix things.

Windows may or may not be easier to use, but it certainly isn’t easier to install and fix.

mvirts ,

Blame the oems, dell ships dell OS with windows branding.

TWeaK ,

Upon installation, Wi-Fi drivers don’t exist, so you cannot use the internet while installing if you’re on Wi-Fi.

This is a good thing with modern Windows. You don’t want it online while it’s installing, you want to install, lock things down a bit and then connect.

CrazyLikeGollum ,

Unless you’re using one of the more recent Win11 builds, where you won’t be able to finish OOBE without an internet connection unless you had the foresight to patch the installer beforehand.

TWeaK ,

Yeah I mean I downgrade new computers to Windows 10 Enterprise and patch authenticate with MAS. I tried using Windows 11, but the taskbar pissed me off too much - I want separate tabs starting from the left, not combined, and everything always showing in the notification area. I was going to put up with the tab thing but having to manually set every single notification icon to not hide itself away was just a dealbreaker. I want to know what’s running, so I know to kill it.

anamethatisnt ,

Mind you, I haven’t installed a Windows Home OS since ever, but Shift+F10 and then using OOBE\bypassnro works just fine for me.

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Amen.

Brkdncr ,

This is mostly an Acer issue I think. A decent vendor will have a software package or even their website that will handle updating your drivers.

Gerudo ,

Surprise! They virtually all do, but they didn’t look.

mlg ,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

Lol I still have the CDs that came with my first built PC parts just to install the drivers because windows would never use the correct one even when the OEM had them very easily online.

Have a complete CD for my monitor, GTX 750ti, and motherboard. Actually had to use mobo CD to get ethernet working (killer ethernet e2400) and I think I might have used nvidia CD or just gone straight to GeForce download.

I can’t believe I can actually say linux has had a working kernel module since at least 2013 but Windows 10 didn’t

TCB13 ,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

From what I got online that computer has either an Intel or MediaTek PCIe Wifi card, both of them should be supported out of the box by Windows. Also you aren’t required to install GPU drivers manually, just run Windows Update and it will pull the driver including the Nvidia panel for you.

I do not understand why we still have this image that Windows is noob friendly, it’s such a convoluted obfuscated process to do anything.

Because it is as long as you don’t fuck things up because you think you know better. Just use Windows update to pull GPU drivers… or download what Acer says is for your computer on their support page… cheap ass hardware that shouldn’t even be on the market doesn’t help either.

lemmy_user_838586 , (edited )

deleted_by_author

    •
    TCB13 , (edited )
    @TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

    it grabs the correct drivers for you (I think? I don’t use windows anymore).

    Yes it does grab the right things without fail. Hardware identification is trivial at this point, all have their IDs.

    windows would install one for you But not the correct one for your card, it would install a generic one, so you have some amount of 2d/3d support. You could get the correct resolution for your HD monitor, or watch videos without stuttering, bit it did not give you the full 3d support for your card. So gaming wouldn’t work well.

    Yes, I remember those times, but we’re past that.

    Nowadays it is usually better to let Windows grab drivers for you because it will grab the driver and no other extra crap. A lot of devices come with useless bundled software and Microsoft is very strict when it comes to installing software with the drivers - they only do it for GPUs, sound cards and a couple exceptions - guess that Microsoft now wants an monopoly on who can install crapware in your system as well :P

    There are a few exceptions to this, special hardware that isn’t properly registered on the Windows Update catalog and Windows won’t pull drivers, for those cases people should head into the support page of their device and download drivers from there. Some brands may also make this easier, for instance HP has a tool that will detect your machine model and download and install the required drivers.

    jfx ,

    It’s actually worse! Last jan Microsoft bricked the entire fleet of laptops in my company with a borked generic driver update. It overwrote the sd reader’s vendor driver blocking all storage access from working whatsoever. From one week to another more or less all devices refused to boot. They basically killed our entire company for half a week, until IT could walk people through efi-disabling the sd reader in every laptop (recent industrial models mind you) just because windows had pulled in the wrong driver. So… no - it’s not great at all with automatic driver installation in windows …

    lemmyreader ,

    Thanks for the post, interesting.

    I do not understand why we still have this image that Windows is noob friendly, it’s such a convoluted obfuscated process to do anything.

    Microsoft has been blackmailing pushing computer hardware companies for a long time to have Windows bundled with computers. Your story has now enlightened me why they did so all these years :)

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Refund_Day

    SmoochyPit ,

    Windows and MacOS are “noob-friendly” for those who use them for simple purposes and out-of-the-box. As soon as you want to do something more advanced, you’re back to googling and installing software from a variety of sources.

    Many linux distros are like that too (others are just not noob-friendly at all), but centralized package management and documentation are nice.

    I’m really glad to be away from registry editing, 50 app icons in the tray, and navigating my way through settings to control panel so I can actually fix my audio devices or network options.

    I’m on Arch now, so I still have plenty of configuration and software, but I know the systems and choose explicitly which ones I use. If something isn’t working or is annoying, it’s my fault.

    possiblylinux127 ,

    Don’t get your Linux packages from random websites. That’s bad practice at best

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