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!



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