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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

It's mind-boggling that we have utterly basic fallback standards for storage (ATA, USB Storage Class), display (VGA), USB (xHCI), webcams (USB UVC), mice/touchpads/touchscreens/keyboards (PS/2, USB HID) or Bluetooth, with BIOS usually providing emulation layers for everything of that excluding webcams and bluetooth so you can theoretically take any modern x86 PC and hand-write a basic OS in Assembler if you want and have all of that sorted out, but nothing equivalent for networking (both wired and wireless) to make bootstrapping less of a pain.

Every OS, no matter if Windows, Linux or BSD, needs to bring a crapload of drivers and binary firmware blobs with it, just to make sure networking works.

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There are multiple networking standards in USB, for example. Almost every USB ethernet dongle is using one of the USB standards for networking. Obviously, Windows didnt support any of these until relatively recently. They were too busy trying to promote "their" standard (RNDIS) which as usual practically nothing supported other than PocketPC and ... early Android.

Whenever you wonder "why dont we have a standard interface for X" the answer is, inevitably, Microsoft. They frequently refuse to provide builtin drivers for standard interfaces and, whenever they do, usually as second class citizens, _even_ when it is their own standard (e.g. MTP).

You cannot even imagine how much the extremely poor support has completely shaped todays smartphone OSes (e.g. the duality in android between media storage and user storage coming from being forced to fallback on Mass Storage) and why everyone used to complain how difficult it is to transfer files from an Android to a PC using a cable.

> They frequently refuse to provide builtin drivers for standard interfaces and, whenever they do, usually as second class citizens, _even_ when it is their own standard (e.g. MTP).

At least Windows comes with MTP support OOTB. macOS to this day doesn't.

I was honestly suprised that my wireless Logitech mouse with the special Logi dongle worked in the BIOS.

It’s because all the wireless magic is in the dongle. I’m not entirely sure on the details but I think it just looks like a hub with potentially multiple hid attached to the host and bios etc have had rudimentary usb hid support for ages.

Yeah, makes sense if you put it that may. Maybe it's just my PTSD from late 00s wireless stuff, now that was magic.

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