Everybody hates the windows store: Microsoft releases it's own *nix like package manager, bypassing the windows store.

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, WolframaticAlpha said:

I really don't know, but there is nothing to be afrad about of the terminal. The GUI takes a lot of steps. Even on brew(for OSX), I found installing software a lot easier than dragging an icon to the applications folder.

 

 

 

Many people will gladly trade a GUI store for a CLI package manager. Imo, there should be both.

It's not that I'm afraid, it's just that I hate it with passion. I was typing noodles of commands when I had Commodore C128 and then in MS-DOS and some more in every god damn Linux distro and now Windows too? Sure, it's more efficient if you just copy a noodle of commands someone provided you with. But this means you spend digging for these commands because you need an exact one instead of just clicking through settings control panel like normal human being in year 2021 and finding it on your own without having to go to internet.

 

I had such oxymoron of having to browse on the internet and download WLAN drivers from repository using device that didn't have said WLAN drivers. I was literally having to download drivers from repository on a system without internet. Coz Linux has no fancy EXE packed driver installers like Windows that you could download elsewhere and bring on USB drive, most have them on repositories of sorts.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, YoungBlade said:

The average user wouldn't even realize anything had changed. Most people don't even know that Windows 98 and Windows XP have different kernels.

I don't know what reality you are in, but every single Windows user out there notices when the UI changes in a OS upgrade. OSX on the other hand looks about the same now as it did in OS 6. Not 10.6, MacOS 6 on the m68k. Apple's insistence on not breaking the user experience at the drop of a hat is why people rarely move FROM the apple ecosystem, always TO it.

 

Linux coderot is insurmountable, and everyone who tries linux as a desktop, inevitably switches back to Windows after a few weeks because they don't want to tinker with crap anymore. Time is too valuable to spend it reading release notes for every automatic upgrade that broke your system, or manually compiling software to work around naive package binaries library linkage. Like it kills me how many flavors of Linux and BSD insist on installing GB's of UI packages just to use headless versions of things like imagemagick.

 

One rapidly wastes days or even months of time trying to maintain "tinkered" OS's. Do understand that the average computer user still believes their computer monitor "is the computer", and 3.5" floppy diskettes were "hard drives"

 

[Guest willies leg]

CLI's are great for automating things.

GUI's are great for ease-of-use.

 

[jagdtigger]

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Coz Linux has no fancy EXE packed driver installers like Windows that you could download elsewhere and bring on USB drive, most have them on repositories of sorts.

Yeah, lets blame the OS for the dev not doing its fing job and package up their driver into a .deb file....

[RejZoR]

18 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Yeah, lets blame the OS for the dev not doing its fing job and package up their driver into a .deb file....

I guess I should blame myself for not having the right laptop with right WLAN module... Because literally NOT A SINGLE god damn Linux distro has driver for this fucking Realtek WLAN module. In Manjaro I had to compile freaking kernel to use some home brewed driver and on Ubuntu I had to use like bazillion long noodles to get a driver that worked like crap and only supported 2.4GHz. I don't give a shit whose fault it is, it's someone's fault and wasn't mine.

 

On windows, even if it's not there by default, you always have a way of doing it somehow and is usually in form of simple EXE installer.

 

I recently found some driver for this WLAN that actually works, but for some stupid reason still isn't part of Linux. Not even in kernel itself if I manually switched it to very latest one in existence. WLAN on laptops is just something that needs to unconditionally work. Without it, whole thing is worthless, making ANY Linux worthless.

[jagdtigger]

2 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I had to compile freaking kernel

Highly doubt it, the worst you have to do is to compile the driver then include it in the initramfs (rebuilding). Never seen a single driver that needs a kernel modification.....

 

As for wlan stick to intel, realtek is notoriously bad with drivers.

[RejZoR]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

Highly doubt it, the worst you have to do is to compile the driver then include it in the initramfs (rebuilding). Never seen a single driver that needs a kernel modification.....

 

As for wlan stick to intel, realtek is notoriously bad with drivers.

It's not like you can pick much. Especially when a lot of vendors are so god damn cryptic about it or have bunch of versions of same laptop. Like HP's "generic" lines that aren't part of Envy, Spectre or the likes. And buying different module is always a questionable thing when bastards lock them down on firmware level...

[Murasaki]

Can you even hate something you dont use? Though I won't miss it if it goes down in flames.

[jagdtigger]

1 minute ago, RejZoR said:

It's not like you can pick much. Especially when a lot of vendors are so god damn cryptic about it or have bunch of versions of same laptop. Like HP's "generic" lines that aren't part of Envy, Spectre or the likes. And buying different module is always a questionable thing when bastards lock them down on firmware level...

As a rule of thumb i wont buy any pc/laptop that does not have a full spec about whats inside, including networking.....

[RejZoR]

2 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

As a rule of thumb i wont buy any pc/laptop that does not have a full spec about whats inside, including networking.....

Even if there are specs, it's not like you have selection of 6 different models. I grabbed this one because it had Ryzen 2500U, 8GB RAM (in dual channel!) and 256GB NVMe SSD for like 480€. Only thing I looked was if it has RALink WLAN. I had that once on some Lenovo and it was absolute trash. Never had issues with Intel, Broadcom or Realtek. Till now. But only with ALL Linux distros. Windows detects it flawlessly.

[WhitetailAni]

14 minutes ago, James Evens said:

May I ask what gives you the hope that this package manager will work? It is still a Microsoft Windows product.

I've found Microsoft's command line tools to work better than their GUI tools. Plus there's things that you can do with the command line that you can't do with a GUI, such as copying the contents of your EFI partition.

[Mark Kaine]

 im not sure this is what ya'll really talking about but one of the dumbest "features" of windows is that it needs to install things into a "registry" which often doesnt get cleared if you remove something , even the fact you need to "install" anything doesnt make too much sense, I have some programs that "just work" once unpacked, or you really just need the "exe" and it literally "just works" and if you dont want the program anymore you just delete it and any folders it may have made, or you keep them. No "installer bs".  They call them "portable" but to me its just "hassle free".

 

 

[WolframaticAlpha]

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

I guess I should blame myself for not having the right laptop with right WLAN module... Because literally NOT A SINGLE god damn Linux distro has driver for this fucking Realtek WLAN module. In Manjaro I had to compile freaking kernel to use some home brewed driver and on Ubuntu I had to use like bazillion long noodles to get a driver that worked like crap and only supported 2.4GHz. I don't give a shit whose fault it is, it's someone's fault and wasn't mine.

 

On windows, even if it's not there by default, you always have a way of doing it somehow and is usually in form of simple EXE installer.

 

I recently found some driver for this WLAN that actually works, but for some stupid reason still isn't part of Linux. Not even in kernel itself if I manually switched it to very latest one in existence. WLAN on laptops is just something that needs to unconditionally work. Without it, whole thing is worthless, making ANY Linux worthless.

I am using a realtek rtl 8192 on my Linux desktop. It works flawlessly. Bare debians requires me to load it manually, but arch, ubuntu and clear linux picked it out of the box.

 

In fact as you can see on the arch wiki, only one realtek card is unsupported. And it was made in 2005. Maybe your card is an anomaly.

 

"In Manjaro I had to compile freaking kernel to use some home brewed driver and on Ubuntu I had to use like bazillion long noodles to get a driver that worked like crap and only supported 2.4GHz. I don't give a shit whose fault it is, it's someone's fault and wasn't mine."

 

Oh fuck. This is really fucked up. I would request you to post an issue on the arch/manjaro forums. I am not telling you to use linux again. Just bring it to the notice of the devs.

[Kisai]

36 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

It's not like you can pick much. Especially when a lot of vendors are so god damn cryptic about it or have bunch of versions of same laptop. Like HP's "generic" lines that aren't part of Envy, Spectre or the likes. And buying different module is always a questionable thing when bastards lock them down on firmware level...

Let's be honest. Anytime you see "Realtek" as a part in a computer, you should probably avoid it.

 

I'm not pooh-poohing using computers with it, but from a maintenance side, realtek has some of the worst driver installation BS I've seen next to Intel.

 

Intel: (attempt) install of driver, wait several minutes, get a massive log file if it fails, and no clear indication why it failed. Reboot mandatory, try again.,

Realtek: (attempt) install of driver, first thing it does is uninstall the driver and reboot the computer. Better hope that wasn't your only network interface or you're now seriously screwed if it goes sideways. Better hope you don't need to login to a domain to use the computer. Then once you login it automatically continues the install, and then reboots the computer again.

 

It's almost as if Windows Update knows what it's doing when it installs these drivers, and yet it doesn't, and requires you to install the driver's functionality through the Windows store, and no, I'm not making this up, for it to actually work.  Realtek audio drivers on a stock laptop without using the OEM-provided image, will never work. You will need to install the driver manually otherwise the headphone jack will not work, and external USB audio devices will not work. Even if you let windows get it from Windows Update.

 

Intel, at least the DCH GPU, iRST and networking drivers that Windows Update will install, will actually work without installing some cruft from the Windows store. However good luck if you screw up the order you installed things in and brick the device. 

 

At any rate. Linux support is non-existent for most laptop hardware, and for a very good reason, people don't use Linux on Laptops, because it's an extremely poor experience due to OEM's willingness to use cheaper parts to save a few nickels. Audio, Wifi and even webcam's built into laptops often DO NOT work on Linux because the specific parts are often omitted from the kernel, because again, people often don't use Linux on laptops.  If you intend to run Linux on a Laptop, you must be prepared to rebuild the kernel, if only to build the drivers for the laptop's exotic hardware. Even then, there is a lot of coderot in Linux, and if you have to rebuild the kernel, you'll likely never be able to upgrade the OS except by source from that point forward.

 

[WolframaticAlpha]

1 minute ago, Kisai said:

Let's be honest. Anytime you see "Realtek" as a part in a computer, you should probably avoid it.

 

I'm not pooh-poohing using computers with it, but from a maintenance side, realtek has some of the worst driver installation BS I've seen next to Intel.

 

Intel: (attempt) install of driver, wait several minutes, get a massive log file if it fails, and no clear indication why it failed. Reboot mandatory, try again.,

Realtek: (attempt) install of driver, first thing it does is uninstall the driver and reboot the computer. Better hope that wasn't your only network interface or you're now seriously screwed if it goes sideways. Better hope you don't need to login to a domain to use the computer. Then once you login it automatically continues the install, and then reboots the computer again.

 

It's almost as if Windows Update knows what it's doing when it installs these drivers, and yet it doesn't, and requires you to install the driver's functionality through the Windows store, and no, I'm not making this up, for it to actually work.  Realtek audio drivers on a stock laptop without using the OEM-provided image, will never work. You will need to install the driver manually otherwise the headphone jack will not work, and external USB audio devices will not work. Even if you let windows get it from Windows Update.

 

Intel, at least the DCH GPU, iRST and networking drivers that Windows Update will install, will actually work without installing some cruft from the Windows store. However good luck if you screw up the order you installed things in and brick the device. 

 

At any rate. Linux support is non-existent for most laptop hardware, and for a very good reason, people don't use Linux on Laptops, because it's an extremely poor experience due to OEM's willingness to use cheaper parts to save a few nickels. Audio, Wifi and even webcam's built into laptops often DO NOT work on Linux because the specific parts are often omitted from the kernel, because again, people often don't use Linux on laptops.  If you intend to run Linux on a Laptop, you must be prepared to rebuild the kernel, if only to build the drivers for the laptop's exotic hardware. Even then, there is a lot of coderot in Linux, and if you have to rebuild the kernel, you'll likely never be able to upgrade the OS except by source from that point forward.

 

lol, it was the opposite with my old thinkpad. Windows wouldn't bring up my bluetooth. Linux did it on first boot. I started using linux because of that.

[jagdtigger]

4 minutes ago, Kisai said:

you must be prepared to rebuild the kernel

Nope, if there is a driver in existence it will be either a source based one (needs compiling then you can load it), or pre-compiled in which case you only need to load it, the best case is when you get it as a package file (<-wast majority of drivers i encountered so far).

[Kisai]

Just now, WolframaticAlpha said:

lol, it was the opposite with my old thinkpad. Windows wouldn't bring up my bluetooth. Linux did it on first boot. I started using linux because of that.

I omitted it for brevity, but it's often a ridiculous comparison to compare a Windows OS to a Linux OS for hardware support, as either 

a) Linux supports more hardware by accident, as there are drivers for a lot of obscure things, but you have to enable it in the kernel, as lot of older stuff gets turned off over time to keep the kernel from being massive on small devices, or devices that will never have that hardware like RPi's and other microcontroller SoC's.

b) Windows supports more hardware on purpose, but tends to change the driver model for whatever reason between major versions of the OS resulting in some severe breakage of older drivers, or completely devastation of old hardware support. Key examples of this are support for MIDI hardware (completely removed from Windows 10, if you play a MIDI file and have no external USB Midi synth, you get nothing, and even if you have an old sound card such as an X-Fi or Audigy there will be no mixer for it, so MIDI's go full blast without using the sound card's own mixer), scanners, printers, older parallel-port/serial-port based devices like digital still cameras, modems, IRda, etc.

 

So the takeaway from that is that Windows is more likely to support your NEW PC out of the box, provided you use the OEM image and not try to install it yourself. If you install it yourself, you are very likely going to spend hours installing drivers from the individual manufacturer's websites, and in some cases, will be running into BSOD's doing so if you install them in the wrong order, or you have a poor hardware choice. This really hasn't changed since Windows XP. 

 

Linux on the other hand, if you're willing to tinker, may support more hardware, but never out of the box. This requires knowing what distro actually supports that hardware, and in many cases, as I stated in A, picking a distro that was tested on your hardware. There's no point in building all the kernel drivers for hardware that will never be present on your computer, and some kinds of hardware need the kernel driver compiled in, not as a loadable module, such as disk and network drivers, in order to function at all because they need access to resources on the computer that involve permissions that don't exist after boot.

 

[Kisai]

7 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Nope, if there is a driver in existence it will be either a source based one (needs compiling then you can load it), or pre-compiled in which case you only need to load it, the best case is when you get it as a package file (<-wast majority of drivers i encountered so far).

A lot of good that helps when the driver someone needs is a network driver on a system with no physical access.

[jagdtigger]

7 minutes ago, Kisai said:

A lot of good that helps when the driver someone needs is a network driver on a system with no physical access.

To be fair you most have some really esoteric/rare/ancient hw if ubuntu does not have drivers for it....

[Mark Kaine]

55 minutes ago, Murasaki said:

Can you even hate something you dont use? Though I won't miss it if it goes down in flames.

Yeah, i kinda hate it because I need a certain "surround sound" app to at least try to fix what some update broke, but I cant download it because "windows updates are turned off" which of course they are after they removed surround sound through optical out, yet Windows has no issues to download and install "Nvidia control panel" from the store, even though "updates are turned off"…  the sooner this "store" goes away the better…  cant imagine this happening though, because of all the forced "xbox" tie ins… another thing Id love to get rid off btw, I dont use "xbox" and I dont want it being installed on my computer either (even though some things are cool, in theory, they just dont work properly)

[Murasaki]

4 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Yeah, i kinda hate it because I need a certain "surround sound" app to at least try to fix what some update broke, but I cant download it because "windows updates are turned off" which of course they are after they removed surround sound through optical out, yet Windows has no issues to download and install "Nvidia control panel" from the store, even though "updates are turned off"…  the sooner this "store" goes away the better…  cant imagine this happening though, because of all the forced "xbox" tie ins… another thing Id love to get rid off btw, I dont use "xbox" and I dont want it being installed on my computer either (even though some things are cool, in theory, they just dont work properly)

Oh thankfully I had nothing that required an app so got away from that dumpster fire.. and yeah I agree on the xbox stuff, don't need any of them.

[Gus Pyles]

It's sad seeing people parrot this news about the "package manager" without in any way actually checking up on their facts and understanding that what Microsoft calls a package manager is in no way what anyone who has ever used a package manager expects from one.

There are no managed repositories with signatures, maintainers verifying releases, doing patches, etc. - there's a GitHub where anyone can submit their trash https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs .. and because of this, there is really no strict versioning in place, so you've got a number of unique software vendors deciding on their own versioning schemes, half of whom have never even heard of "semantic versioning" nor care enough to implement it even if they know what it is - so there's little in terms of being able to control software compatibility via this .. "repository".

 

There are basically no packages, it is mainly a wrapper for downloading and installing .exe installers from all around the planet, for example CPU-Z: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/blob/master/manifests/c/CPUID/CPU-Z/1.96/CPUID.CPU-Z.installer.yaml .. these do not provide a way to manage installation, see what is being installed before just running a random .exe, or verify in any way the authenticity of the file. There is no easy way to uninstall these as .exe installers do whatever they want as do the applications after they run. The other option is the MSIX container thing which is causing so many issues with everything installed through the Microsoft Store due to the various restrictions it imposes on the users. When I download software from some developer which is broken (and that happens often) - I can often fix it by injecting DLLs or other changes into the software. MSIX blocks this completely, and makes me rely on inherently unreliable 3rd parties to fix the things they've abandoned years ago because they found something better to do, or hell maybe they just died. This also means that every application will be running their own auto-updater nonsense like before instead of you actually having control over the updates in some way.

There is just no way to define dependencies https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/163

 

The sad fact is that winget is *nothing* like an actual package manager, and people spreading that misinformation is doing a disservice to everyone. I'm really annoyed when in the WAN show they just take this 5 sentence copy & paste from some Microsoft press release and then start talking about the benefits of *actual* package managers as if winget gave any of those.

Also the flat out pointless FUD about "package managers" being for CLI users and power users only. What nonsense. Well implemented package manager is one that has a GUI application called something like "Software store" where you go and find a thing you want installed and click "Install" and then it figures out everything that needs to be done to get that installed and successfully running on your system - including installing the other things it depends on - and just does that. Compare that to the experience where you google for the name of the software, finding 5 shady looking websites to download from each with ads with intentionally confusing looking download buttons on them, rolling the dice on that .exe installer not having any viruses, and then trying to figure out if that requires Visual C++ redistributables or .NET 3.5 or what else and you might see the point. Now *winget* will definitely not get you that, because it's not a package manager, and it's one of the worst jokes for anything like this on the Windows ecosystem alone.

 

Just use Chocolatey. It's basically as close to a package manager you can get on Windows. It even has a GUI - although far from the prettiest one I've seen.

 

In reality Microsoft has heard the community complain about how their "package manager" is not one and how broken it is even as a concept and then refuses to do anything about it, e.g.:

• https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/discussions/847
• https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/discussions/223

 

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

I don't know what reality you are in, but every single Windows user out there notices when the UI changes in a OS upgrade. OSX on the other hand looks about the same now as it did in OS 6. Not 10.6, MacOS 6 on the m68k. Apple's insistence on not breaking the user experience at the drop of a hat is why people rarely move FROM the apple ecosystem, always TO it.

 

Linux coderot is insurmountable, and everyone who tries linux as a desktop, inevitably switches back to Windows after a few weeks because they don't want to tinker with crap anymore. Time is too valuable to spend it reading release notes for every automatic upgrade that broke your system, or manually compiling software to work around naive package binaries library linkage. Like it kills me how many flavors of Linux and BSD insist on installing GB's of UI packages just to use headless versions of things like imagemagick.

 

One rapidly wastes days or even months of time trying to maintain "tinkered" OS's. Do understand that the average computer user still believes their computer monitor "is the computer", and 3.5" floppy diskettes were "hard drives"

 

The OG 6800 OS was black and white.  Before OSX there was no dock. Also the background was always flat grey.  What they rarely do is change keystrokes which can make it seem that way. It does tend to be less jarring though

[Bombastinator]

9 minutes ago, Lietu said:

It's sad seeing people parrot this news about the "package manager" without in any way actually checking up on their facts and understanding that what Microsoft calls a package manager is in no way what anyone who has ever used a package manager expects from one.

There are no managed repositories with signatures, maintainers verifying releases, doing patches, etc. - there's a GitHub where anyone can submit their trash https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs .. and because of this, there is really no strict versioning in place, so you've got a number of unique software vendors deciding on their own versioning schemes, half of whom have never even heard of "semantic versioning" nor care enough to implement it even if they know what it is - so there's little in terms of being able to control software compatibility via this .. "repository".

 

There are basically no packages, it is mainly a wrapper for downloading and installing .exe installers from all around the planet, for example CPU-Z: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-pkgs/blob/master/manifests/c/CPUID/CPU-Z/1.96/CPUID.CPU-Z.installer.yaml .. these do not provide a way to manage installation, see what is being installed before just running a random .exe, or verify in any way the authenticity of the file. There is no easy way to uninstall these as .exe installers do whatever they want as do the applications after they run. The other option is the MSIX container thing which is causing so many issues with everything installed through the Microsoft Store due to the various restrictions it imposes on the users. When I download software from some developer which is broken (and that happens often) - I can often fix it by injecting DLLs or other changes into the software. MSIX blocks this completely, and makes me rely on inherently unreliable 3rd parties to fix the things they've abandoned years ago because they found something better to do, or hell maybe they just died. This also means that every application will be running their own auto-updater nonsense like before instead of you actually having control over the updates in some way.

There is just no way to define dependencies https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/issues/163

 

The sad fact is that winget is *nothing* like an actual package manager, and people spreading that misinformation is doing a disservice to everyone. I'm really annoyed when in the WAN show they just take this 5 sentence copy & paste from some Microsoft press release and then start talking about the benefits of *actual* package managers as if winget gave any of those.

Also the flat out pointless FUD about "package managers" being for CLI users and power users only. What nonsense. Well implemented package manager is one that has a GUI application called something like "Software store" where you go and find a thing you want installed and click "Install" and then it figures out everything that needs to be done to get that installed and successfully running on your system - including installing the other things it depends on - and just does that. Compare that to the experience where you google for the name of the software, finding 5 shady looking websites to download from each with ads with intentionally confusing looking download buttons on them, rolling the dice on that .exe installer not having any viruses, and then trying to figure out if that requires Visual C++ redistributables or .NET 3.5 or what else and you might see the point. Now *winget* will definitely not get you that, because it's not a package manager, and it's one of the worst jokes for anything like this on the Windows ecosystem alone.

 

Just use Chocolatey. It's basically as close to a package manager you can get on Windows. It even has a GUI - although far from the prettiest one I've seen.

 

In reality Microsoft has heard the community complain about how their "package manager" is not one and how broken it is even as a concept and then refuses to do anything about it, e.g.:

• https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/discussions/847
• https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli/discussions/223

 

So it’s only CALLED a package manager. Argh.

[WolframaticAlpha]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

I omitted it for brevity, but it's often a ridiculous comparison to compare a Windows OS to a Linux OS for hardware support, as either 

a) Linux supports more hardware by accident, as there are drivers for a lot of obscure things, but you have to enable it in the kernel, as lot of older stuff gets turned off over time to keep the kernel from being massive on small devices, or devices that will never have that hardware like RPi's and other microcontroller SoC's.

b) Windows supports more hardware on purpose, but tends to change the driver model for whatever reason between major versions of the OS resulting in some severe breakage of older drivers, or completely devastation of old hardware support. Key examples of this are support for MIDI hardware (completely removed from Windows 10, if you play a MIDI file and have no external USB Midi synth, you get nothing, and even if you have an old sound card such as an X-Fi or Audigy there will be no mixer for it, so MIDI's go full blast without using the sound card's own mixer), scanners, printers, older parallel-port/serial-port based devices like digital still cameras, modems, IRda, etc.

 

So the takeaway from that is that Windows is more likely to support your NEW PC out of the box, provided you use the OEM image and not try to install it yourself. If you install it yourself, you are very likely going to spend hours installing drivers from the individual manufacturer's websites, and in some cases, will be running into BSOD's doing so if you install them in the wrong order, or you have a poor hardware choice. This really hasn't changed since Windows XP. 

 

Linux on the other hand, if you're willing to tinker, may support more hardware, but never out of the box. This requires knowing what distro actually supports that hardware, and in many cases, as I stated in A, picking a distro that was tested on your hardware. There's no point in building all the kernel drivers for hardware that will never be present on your computer, and some kinds of hardware need the kernel driver compiled in, not as a loadable module, such as disk and network drivers, in order to function at all because they need access to resources on the computer that involve permissions that don't exist after boot.

 

Um, no. You actually do get drivers for new PC's. My new workstation, with an i7 10700K, an RX 5700XT, onboard audio, onboard networking, a realtek usb wifi adapter, and a tp link bluetooth card worked flawlessly ootb. It is pretty new hardware and my bluetooth card wasn't even made for Linux. It had no installation instructions, and there are no linux drivers for it. It is a bt 5.0 card and gives me 10 metres of range. Everything worked for me.

 

 

 Making a generalization, like saying that windows works for new machines, but linux for old is really annoying and idiotic. Sure, hardware manufacturers prefer windows as their primary plastform, but the thing is that Linux has a really strong networking interface. The open source drivers suck for stuff like nvidia(due to no variableclocking), but they can work for minor variations. Point in case, if you replace a kepler gtx 650 with a gtx 740(with the nouveau driver), the 650 driver will work for the 740 on opengl, and the results will be in line. Many people criticize Linux for having bad driver support, but unless you are using fedora or debian or gentoo(which are pretty vehemently FOSS), you'll be fine.