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Comment by snazz | Hacker News Reader

I’d argue this is good for users, because vendor-supplied drivers always seem to have crappy updater software running at all times and send pop-ups at all hours on Windows. Vendors really need to better support open-source drivers for user experience purposes, but they don’t because they want more control over their market.

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Don't conflate the updater with the driver itself. Apple could have enforced a policy around integration with the system update functionality or something, but the driver supplied by the vendor will always be better/faster because it can exploit internal knowledge about the hardware.

Yes, I get that. All I’m trying to say is that the current user experience with third-party drivers for anything (especially nVidia graphics cards) is not the kind of thing Apple would want to inflict on their users.

That's not true. If you let Windows manage your drivers, you won't have any popups. Drivers will be updated as part of standard Windows update. Now if you want latest drivers and you're intalling GeForce Experience application, then yeah, it'll notify you of new drivers once in a month. It's just a standard Windows notification and if you installed that application, probably you want to stay on latest drivers, so why would you complain about that?

Often when I plug one of my Razer mice into a different USB port I get a big pop up with a prompt to install their Synapse software that takes two clicks to dismiss.

It's not good for users when vendor drivers work and Apple's drivers don't. I know OpenGL is deprecated, but a lot of apps still use it because it's cross platform, and Apple has the worst GL drivers in the industry. Even Metal is missing many features from Vulkan [1].

[1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK/blob/master/Docs/Mo...

Right, I'm not an expert on the Metal API but I noticed there didn't seem to be a way to submit split barriers to the command queues.

I don't know much more about Metal beyond that though.

Yep, nothing better for users than a platform no one develops for with great update infrastructure.

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