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Comment by coolnow | Hacker News Reader

>They control the OS, so they control the ability of a manufacturer's bug to affect the user.

Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time. As you stated, the decisions Microsoft took got them to their throne.

I've switched to OSX but i still use Windows 10 on my other laptop and Windows 8.1 on my gaming PC and haven't had a bluescreen since Vista. I literally have never seen it for years. I was shocked to see it changed appearance in a screenshot in an article about Windows 8. And the "upgrade" to Yosemite has completely destroyed my wifi stability, made the system sluggish (Safari even decides to stop smooth scrolling after a few hours), boot time has pretty much doubled with the same amount of apps installed (SSD too).

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> Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time.

And MS are in control of how much of a driver needs to be in the kernel. It's not a foregone conclusion that a driver bug cannot be isolated from the user. The techniques involved aren't new. Hell, I don't think they were new when Windows 95 was being written. Again, it's a trade-off; it's easier to write an OS where a driver lives by default in kernel space (certainly with reasonable performance), and where to draw that dividing line is a choice which Microsoft made. They've introduced user-mode drivers for some things, and this is a very good thing.

I don't have a dog in the OS X/Windows reliability pissing match, but part of the reason you won't have seen a bluescreen in years is because Windows 7 (apart from being more reliable from having more man-hours thrown at it, along with an updated driver model from Vista) changed the default behaviour: what would have caused a BSOD in Vista causes a reboot in 7, so you never actually see the error.

>I've switched to OSX but i still use Windows 10 on my other laptop and Windows 8.1 on my gaming PC and haven't had a bluescreen since Vista. I literally have never seen it for years.

I can reproducibly blue screen Windows 8.1 with the latest ATI drivers (as well as every driver for the last year and a half) by watching hardware accelerated Flash movies on an ATI HD 7770 GHz Edition. Swapping the card to a different ATI card fixes it. Swapping the card to an nVidia card fixes it. Swapping the 7770 GHz for another 7770 GHz does not fix it.

This only happens in Windows. It does not happen with the ATI drivers in Linux.

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