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Peter N. M. Hansteen walks through use of OpenBSD on a modern laptop in his latest blog post. While OpenBSD has a good reputation for servers and routers, many do not realize how well it works on laptops with supported hardware. He's been running it as the only OS on his laptops for well over a decade at this point and shares his experience with recent hardware. OpenBSD is clean, organized, and predictable. It does what you configure it to do, and only that, with no backtalk or second-guessing — like from other systems. Its documentation is second to none.
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confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
-- Josh Billings
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:42PM (1 child)
No I didn't.
1) Correct.
2) NOT CORRECT. If your PC boots into a Windows boot environment (bog-standard boot disk, OEM setup pre-installed on the machine, whatever), it will connect to Windows Update and get everything else it needs. HUNDREDS of different models / manufacturer of machines, each with all kinds of weird devices, standard Windows install (just the boot-disk drivers, and whatever it can get from the net) and it all just works, to the extent that the average home user would get things working enough to use the machine. The worst culprit is wifi drivers, but almost every device I've seen can load Ethernet drivers without a hitch to do this, and then work from there. Windows has this to the point where I don't EVER install a driver for a machine, whether brand-new out of the box, 2017 model, or re-imaged junk that's been in place for nearly a decade.
3) Somewhere in-between. Networking is generally good, wifi is generally much worse off (firmware etc. mainly), and other things are highly specific on models (e.g. some graphics cards take a LOT of messing to make work right, e.g. Intel/nVidia Optimus for many early models)
4) Such things are not in the realm of things that Kubuntu should be tinkering with, not in an environment where dual-boot is a possibility. Damn right it should be asking. A problem that you can't get around, I agree, but it's not something that should be hidden anyway.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormreaver on Wednesday July 12 2017, @07:00PM
In the decades in which I have had to install Windows, I have never, ever experienced this. It's how Microsoft would like the world to believe Windows installs work, but it's a lot like Bigfoot sightings: people claim to have seen it, but the pictures are always fake. In every single Windows install I have ever done (or even seen done), I have seen nothing but Windows failing to find drivers through Windows Update. I have always had to either hunt down the driver disk, or go to the manufacturer's Web site.
It's entirely possible that there is some obscure magical incancation that allows Windows to find drivers on Windows Update, but I have no idea what that might be. But having fought with the sadism of Windows for too many years, I stopped caring. Kubuntu installs have been so trivially simple for so long that I leave the Windows mess to the more masochistic crowd.