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Comment by yodon | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has suffered on an almost daily basis from the poor quality hardware drivers on the Surface platform anything Microsoft can do to improve driver quality is a win in my book (and would have saved MSFT thousands of dollars as the MSFT store replaced my surface and keyboard multiple times at no charge before I finally tracked the issue down to the Bluetooth stack crashing and taking down the physically connected keyboard, which was happenning to me almost daily)

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Every time I think about switching from MacOS to Windows I'm glad that I find a post like this that reminds me of how bad Windows is in comparison. I'll happily deal with a slow hardware refresh cycle from Apple if it means things actually work.

Do keep in mind that's a pretty serious selection bias filter you're applying to the tiny fraction of driver complaints people have (and I say that as the guy who kicked off the complaint about drivers)

This is the framework used to make those crashy surface drivers.

Reminds me that i have a "fun" one here.

Two tablets, both using the same Intel internals (as best i can tell), but one has a non-functional SD reader while the other works just fine. The difference between them is that one uses 32-bit Windows (no clue why) while the other uses 64-bit windows.

Thing is that the SD slot worked fine when i initially got the tablet, but broke at some point after a major Windows update. And thee is no way i can find to roll back drivers.

I have an older but perfectly functional scanner that is a PITA to get working on Windows because the company never shipped an official 64 bit driver for it. Instead I have to download the driver for a slightly newer model and hack it slightly (add my scanner to the list of devices it supports) to get my scanner to work on Windows. It's so dumb.

As far as I know there isn't a "Postscript over IP" solution for this like there is for printers. There is no generic universally supported protocol that scanners could support that would future proof them.

SANE is a less than completely user friendly experience to set up too. I've found it to be pretty fiddly, although once you get it working it seems to do ok.

Reminds me of some years back when a single driver was added to Linux that allowed it to support 100+ models of webcams. This because every damn brand and model used the same internals, but had different USB IDs.

And we should not forget that RMS' initially rallying call was about printer drivers. where as with the old printer he had the source, so he could add a bit of code to notify the people with jobs in the queue that the printer was out of paper, the new printer only came with a binary blob driver.

Methinks the hardware world is yet another incarnation of what happened in the gpu world, layers of bs folded onto themselves.

A good deal of open hardware, even without sophisticated capabilities would free a lot of time and energy for open source OSes

Same scanner issue here (will try your hack some time)

However >There is no generic universally supported protocol that scanners could support that would future proof them.

There must be... because on Kubuntu it works Plug n Play with the bundled software...

That's SANE, a huge project to re-implement all scanner drivers in one megaproject. It can be a bit of a bear if the plug and play stuff doesn't work. On my scanner it defaults to a driver that only generates a fuzzy black and white image so I have to force it to use the right driver.

Speaking of Windows Update breaking things, my Windows 10 tablet (a cheap Kiano) tends to gain or lose the ability to detect screen orientation every other update. At this point I'm (again) stuck having to manually change the orientation whenever I want to work in portrait tablet mode.

I do not understand how this happens.

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