Bonum Certa Men Certa

Windows is Still Just a “Poorly Debugged Set of Device Drivers”



Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original

Windows is still just a “poorly debugged set of device drivers”.



I noticed that someone was blogging about Microsoft feeling threatened by Netscape enough to stamp it out when Marc Andreessen said he would reduce Windows to a “poorly debugged set of device drivers”.



Well, the OS has to have a pile of device drivers. Linux has many. More than Windows. Including for some very weird hardware.



They’re not all exceptionally well written. I’m not going to lie and say they are. Most work fine. The less stable stuff goes off into a staging tree until it improves. If you don’t have the hardware, it wastes no resources because it’s not even loaded.



But it’s nice to plug hardware in and have it be recognized immediately, vs. Windows going off to find the driver that time forgot, which proceeds to malfunction.



If it can even manage that.



My last portable hard drive was a Western Digital.



I plugged it into Windows 10 when I got this laptop, and this laptop came out very late in Windows 10’s lifecycle. Just 10 months before Windows 11.



What does the latest release of Windows 10 do?



It connects to Microsoft, pulls in a driver that the hard drive didn’t even need in order to function, Called “WDSES_PreWIN8”.



And when I started having trouble with Windows, it was that driver that was causing it.



A driver I didn’t even want, or ask Windows to go find.



A driver the hard disk worked just as well without.



Meant for an OS that came out in 2012.



And what does it do when you load WDSES_PreWIN8?



Well, for starters, it’s not compatible with Windows 10’s “Virtualization Based Security” features, so Windows will quietly disable all of those, I suppose making you even more vulnerable to malware than you already are for using Windows in the first place



And the only reason you’d ever know it is if you go and look at the Windows Defender screen that talks about that feature and see why it’s not running, and then and only then does it point at that driver, and you then have to find out what the hell that thing even is (I never did, btw. WD didn’t seem to have any information on it. The only reason I knew it was Western Digital is because Windows told me.), and remove it, and blacklist it so it doesn’t come back!



Then who knows what happens if you have WDSES_PREWIN8 loaded and try to upgrade to Windows 11?



I didn’t stick around that long before skipping town and loading GNU/Linux on another laptop.



It’s just sloppy that Windows loads all these old drivers that Microsoft knows aren’t even compatible, and loads anyway.



23 years later, Windows is a “poorly debugged set of device drivers”, which is why it’s dying.



Other operating systems have the same Web browsers you can run on Windows, they have Office suites, and great strides have been made in gaming, allowing thousands of the best games to be played.



Everything from classic consoles, to newly released titles.



The biggest complaint I have with where GNU/Linux is at now is that Microsoft is still up to its usual tricks of figuring out who is the most corrupt major GNU/Linux vendor and “partnering” with it to sabotage the community.



Their previous deals haven’t quite panned out because when they ruin one company, there’s yet more distributions for the users to flee to than there were last time they managed to take one out.



Seemingly forever a pain-in-the-ass, Microsoft hasn’t gained much traction this way because the community will re-assemble itself.



Perhaps they should fix Windows so that it’s capable of competing by technical merit.



“That was a joke. Haha. Fat chance!” -GlaDOS



I really am eager to see what PornHub’s desktop OS trends are looking like for Windows this year.



They’ve been bleeding over the past two few years. Between 2019 and 2021, they went from over 70% to just 64%.



They’ve turned SJVN at ZDNet into “Backup Dr. Pizza”.



He’s been spewing the same type of anti-GNU/Linux and pro-Microsoft bullshit that Peter Bright was at Ars Technica, before Bright/Dr. Pizza got convicted for trying to rape two children under 10.



Although I’m certainly not accusing SJVN of being a perverted monster, I am accusing him of being where Microsoft went after Dr. Pizza to get their stuff published. I can’t imagine what SJVN’s job must be like.



It reminds me of Bob Arcter in A Scanner Darkly, being forced to read the DEA’s drug war propaganda, being fed his lines through an earpiece, and the agent tells him to “just say the shit”. Or Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty, bemoaning “being a whore for the advertising industry” while it sucks out his soul.



While Pizza/Bright was a willing co-conspirator of Microsoft’s due to being a very bad person, I think SJVN is just trying to make it to retirement. So it may not be fair to compare their reasons to collaborate with Microsoft, but the result is the same. Microsoft’s propaganda is still being published.



I used to read SJVN even when I didn’t read anything else because I felt informed about distribution reviews and the GNU/Linux articles, but then when it drifted to WSL and Microsoft SQL Server, I stopped paying any attention to him at all.



Does anyone read ZDNet anymore? I can’t remember the last time I did. It was going downhill so fast that I haven’t seen anything about them that Roy Schestowitz hasn’t highlighted about them in a while. Sad!



Recent Techrights' Posts

Rumour: After FSF Abandons Office in Boston LibrePlanet Will Also Leave Boston
In the past, Libreplanet (or LibrePlanet) was 'branched' out of MIT to "lesser" universities in the same city
linuxsecurity.com is 100% Slopfarm, Nonstop Fake 'Articles' About Security and "Linux"
More than one fake 'author' participates in this, so it deserves condemnation
Social Control Media as a Rapid Race to the Bottom - Part III - Foreign Interference and Chaff/Flare
Why would you trust alleged 'communication' (platforms) controlled by the same people who cut your undersea cables?
[Video] Richard Stallman Explains What Intelligence in Computing Really Means and How Old That Is (Story About 1975, 50 Years Ago)
Uploaded 11 hours ago by Manuel Cuda News
 
Microsoft Laid Off Several Thousands of Workers (Not Counting Those Driven Out) in 3+ Waves of Layoffs in 2 Months in 2025
About a thousand workers laid off per month
Microsoft Reduced to Almost Nothing in the Congos
Even worse for Microsoft in DRC (Democratic Republic Of The Congo)
Why We No Longer Hear About "Red Hat Layoffs"
Sometimes they don't call them "layoffs" are all; it's just PIPs, RTO, and "relocation" offers. They try to compel people to resign/retire
Reputation is Not a Human Right, It's Something One Earns
One can also lose one's reputation for harming women
FreeBSD Foundation is Trying to Improve "Laptop Support", But It Has Outsourced Everything to Microsoft Proprietary Software
Despite many valid alternatives existing and fast maturing
Links 06/03/2025: Discord Wants the Public to Pay for Losses, MongoDB Shares Collapse
Links for the day
Gemini Links 06/03/2025: Remaking Sites, Gemini Capsule Turns 5
Links for the day
Links 06/03/2025: Trade Wars, Trademarks, Attacks on (and by) the Media, Digg to Relaunch
Links for the day
The Fall of the Open Source Initiative (OSI): The Problems Are Much Bigger Than the Rigged Elections
It's not only about elections
Dr. Andy Farnell on Brutality and (or of) Brute-Force Computing
"Understandably, the ecological cost of compute was never really on the minds of pure computer scientists"
IBM Absorbs More of Red Hat and There Are Several Layoff Rumours
Those are just rumours for now
Gemini Links 06/03/2025: Digg, Project Failure, and More
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 05, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 05, 2025
Links 05/03/2025: Prioritising Science, Patents Squashed
Links for the day
Gemini Links 05/03/2025: News Processing, Misbehaving, and Git
Links for the day
GNU/Linux Cracking Past the 4% Barrier in Hungary
There are still quite a few very famous developers and Free software projects from Hungary
Meanwhile in the Matrix Room #dei:fedoraproject.org
Remember that IBM does a lot of perception manipulation
Rumour About Red Hat Layoffs Yesterday
Can somebody from Red Hat or someone who knows someone there (impacted or not) confirm that there are layoffs this week at Red Hat?
New Short Clip of Richard Stallman's Thoughts on the "Hey Hi" (AI) Hype, Courtesy of Manuel Cuda News
about 6 hrs ago
What is fixated behavior? Stalker or just a fan of Emma Raducanu?
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
In Iran, GNU/Linux Reaches New Highs, According to statCounter
Does that make sense? In light of geopolitics? Probably.
Always Safety First
We have some reasons to suspect that one of several parties (possibly not in the UK but having connections here), having suffered major and very expensive setbacks, may look to harm the messenger one way or another
Links 05/03/2025: Starbucks Debt Soars and CFO Changed, Apple Pretends to Value Privacy, "Cloudflare Blocking Privacy Focused Users From Accessing Third-Party Websites"
Links for the day
Canonical's Latest Love Letter to Microsoft (Ubuntu Promoting Proprietary Spyware With Back Doors)
Typical Canonical, promoting Microsoft (and sometimes Windows) instead of competing against them
What Microsoft and GitHub Really, Really, REALLY Do Not Want You to See or Know About
They're trying to misuse law in a completely different continent or to allege that reporting important facts is in breach of privacy law
Slopwatch: linuxsecurity.com and Other 'Linux' Sites With LLM Slop
SEO spam with machine-generated fodder, plus a person to whom English isn't a first language
GNU/Linux Climbs to Record Levels in Switzerland. Can the EU, Norway, the UK, and Switzerland Divorce GAFAM?
Germany openly speaks about becoming independent from the US. How about Switzerland?
Gemini Links 05/03/2025: Living in Interesting Times, Font, and Social Control Media with Gos v1.0.0
Links for the day
Just Because Common Currencies (Including the US Dollar) Are Considered Uncertain Doesn't Mean People Should Adopt Volatile Multi-Level (Pyramid) Schemes
the scammers are trying to "go mainstream"
Use RSS Readers Instead of Social Control Media
RSS readers were designed to save time. Social Control Media was designed to waste time.
The 'Windows Era' Already Came to an End
Microsoft said to shareholders everything would be alright because of "clown computing" and then "hey hi"
The Fall of the Open Source Initiative (OSI): Microsoft Committing the Largest GPL Violation in Human History, Then OSI Covering That Up on Microsoft's Payroll
LLMs don't make GPL violations any more noble or acceptable; it's not hard to see what OSI was paid by Microsoft for
Social Control Media as a Rapid Race to the Bottom - Part II - Think Before You Talk
The 'socmed' nonsense does not exist in our home
Links 04/03/2025: Hardware, Health, Data Breaches, Politics
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 04, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 04, 2025
Luxembourg: GNU/Linux at 8% Based on Estimates
steady increases this year
Gemini Links 04/03/2025: Bicycle, Photos, and Motorola 6809 Assemblers
Links for the day
Crossbow tragedy, bigger than Kyle Clifford, social media culture
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Microsoft OSI Apparently Still Reading Techrights Closely, Trying to Make Face-Saving PR Moves
They have long had this reactionary rhythm, wherein it feels like we can 'control' what they publish and when by merely highlighting facts about them
Links 04/03/2025: Microsoft/Korea Game Industry Association Workforce Cuts, Outlook and 365 Outage Affects Very Many
Links for the day
Transcript of Richard Stallman's Interview With Manuel Cuda News in Italy (Debunking Fake "AI")
A rough draft, but checked by two people
Chad: All-Time Lows for Windows, According to statCounter
According to statCounter, many in Chad moved to Android
Links 04/03/2025: Universities Are Under Attack, Windows Attracts Ransom Against Ministry of Health
Links for the day
Microsoft Collapses While GNU/Linux Rises in Bulgaria, According to statCounter
Microsoft is losing across all sectors
The Fall of the Open Source Initiative (OSI): An Introduction
In a nutshell: there's a massive conflict inside the OSI and the OSI stooges (staff serving Big Sponsors like Microsoft) try to hide it
Paraguay: GNU/Linux Surging to New Usage Levels (7%), According to statCounter
Notice that the gains are at Microsoft Windows' expense
Social Control Media as a Rapid Race to the Bottom - Part I - That Sinking Feeling
When you realise you made an error and things you adopted more than 15 years ago became utterly bad
Microsoft's Entryism as Mortal Risk/Danger: The Example of the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
Microsoft is a cult
Links 04/03/2025: Microsoft Issues Policy Instructions to the Cheeto Mussolini Administration, Cloudflare Engages in Mass Censorship Again
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/03/2025: Athens, Fedora 41, and Yelling at Clouds
Links for the day
FSF Amicus Brief: Aspose.PDF for .NET 24.2.0, OOXML (.docx), and Microsoft Word (Proprietary)
Could the FSF not find any law firm that, in addition to talking about or for Free software, does not use .NET, OOXML, and almost everything Microsoft?
New Interview With Richard Stallman in Italy (Manuel Cuda News)
Due to Google's growing aggression against Free software and proper APIs, this cannot be downloaded and converted to a free format
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Belatedly Comments on Case That Tests Copyleft in the United States
"The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today it has submitted an amicus brief in the case entitled Neo4j"
If They Try to Censor You on Some Topic, Then You Should Cover This Topic Even More
OSI is only a small part of it
The UEFI hype and Microsoft's lies
By Sami Tikkanen
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 03, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, March 03, 2025
Thorsten Glaser & Open Source Initiative (OSI) resignations due to AI whitewashing
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock