MBReview.com reviewed Windows Vista, and concluded: "Overall, my first impressions of Vista, and specifically Vista Ultimate, are quite good. I had few problems moving over hardware and software, other than issues of driver support by manufacturers. This is an extremely annoying issue and I'm sure I'm not alone in my distaste for such lack of driver support. The new Aero interface is gorgeous and is one of the big reasons I have moved over to Vista on my main system. It has it's quirks like anything, but it is a big improvement from WindowsXP. Thus far, I'm impressed."
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Member since:2006-01-02
I agree that Microsoft has some blame for the lack of drivers. It should be noted that nVidia and ATI had hands in the design of the WDDM and that they have access to Microsoft's kernel code (AFAIK, they actually have people on MS's campus who have offices in MS buildings and develop the code there). Graphics drivers are complex beasts, though... Someone said, though I'm not sure I can believe it, that there's more code in the nVidia binary blob than in the core of the linux kernel not counting driver modules. It takes time to write such a driver from scratch, which is what these folks have been doing.
And there's also the chicken-egg problem. They don't have the financial incentive to push hard on the Vista drivers until they have hardware in Vista customers' hands. This issue will improve steadily as more feedback comes in from the early adopters and crashes are fixed through Dr. Watson. There's probably nothing to be done but wait.
Member since:2005-07-06
I blame Nvidia in both cases! when there are problems with Linux, I don't blame Linux because of the lack of graphics support, I blame Nvidia and their lack of drive to provide a decent quality driver.
I blame Nvidia for not properly taking advantage of DRM and other modules, but instead creating their own frankenstein monstrocity simply to get around licencing requirements.
With that being said, when I blame Linux vendors for the lack of commercial software like Adobe Creative Suite on Linux, I get blamed for blaming the wrong party - interesting double standards we have here.
Member since:2006-06-03
It's hardly a double-standard!
The situation as I see it, is that Nvidia have developed and sold a product with working software.
A third party company (MS) with enough market clout to be able to just ignore any complaints/boycotts from the industry arbitrarily turn around and tell them to develop new software because they have decided to change the interfaces that their product should use.
NVidia have no incentive to spend lots of money developing drivers for older hardware OR developing dual drivers for newer hardware.
Failing to do so will drive H/W sales in new products anyway.
The situation is much simpler and bi-polar in Linux. Linux have provided a system and the commercial vendors have refused to support it. There's not much that Linux has done wrong in this situation.
Member since:
2005-07-08
Why blame Microsoft? they don't write the drivers;
You and I know that, and I'm sure that ormandj knows this, too. But the primary purpose of an OS is to provide applications with access to the hardware. If it can't do this reliably, than from the user's perspective, the OS is faulty.
For comparison's sake, people always say that "Linux doesn't support my graphics card by default, and the proprietary drivers suck." In theory, this is really the graphics vendor's fault for not adequately supporting Linux. But in reality, it's Linux that isn't providing the hardware support that the user needs.
Place the blame one whomever you wish, but for the user, the buck stops at the OS vendor.