Which proprietary software do you prefer over their open-source alternatives, and why?

mayflower@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 428 points –
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The driver thing confuses me. What I love about Linux is I DON’T have to go on a wild search expedition for drivers or install random software to get my hardware working.

Wacom tablet just this week.. plug in and works perfect on Linux.

Wasted 30 minutes getting it to work on Windows and disabling the junky software it comes with on boot.

Yep. I've got a Logitech mouse that always bugged out on Windows. Tried downloading their app/drivers and the install indicator just kept going and going above 100%. Completely broken.

Same mouse on Ubuntu works perfectly.

I have a razer mouse, the OSS alternative for linux has never worked perfect.

Often times it forgets the color settings, which admittedly isnt a big deal and not life altering.

but the clutch has never worked, and considering I have hand tremors, that clutch really helped me with sniping in games on windows, and now its just a dead feature i can never use on linux.

Never a day where a Razer product doesn't have an issue with something in particular.

Just sucks that the very thing I bought it for, to help me overcome a physical issue, is now functionally useless/nonexistent thanks to switching to linux.

if I knew then what I knew now I'd have just bought a cheap PoS generic mouse lol

Blaming windows because Logitech fucked up is a bit weird to me.

It’s up to the hardware company to make drivers. If they do a shit job it’s their fault not windows. If the driver isn’t working well it’s the developer who wrote it.

The only issues I’ve ever had with drivers in windows is when the company building the hardware does a bad job at it. Super rare for me anyway.

You may want to re-read the comment I was replying to. At no point did I blame Windows. I simply provided an anecdote supporting that Linux has decent out of the box support for drivers.

I like Linux but there are absolutely some driver problems with laptops. Just go on the arch wiki and search for any recent laptop and it's quite likely that something will be slightly buggy or not working. Often there is an easy solution.

I don't think I've ever had a driver issue in Linux where something straight up didn't work, except for printers (but I've had printer issues with Windows and osx too, so that's more a printer than an OS problem). I have had to find different drivers when I want some very specific feature though. Really most of my issues with Linux are just because I'm trying to do something complicated in the first place. If I had simple usage I don't think I'd have any problems at all, vs Windows where sometimes it just randomly fucks itself up.

Maybe not just driver but also firmware. Some firmware is not included by default and needed to be installed/downloaded.

I use Linux as my main pc, and while things will work without looking for drivers. They don't always have 100% of their functionality. My Logitech keyboard and mouse for example, worked without doing anything but the macro or "G" keys aren't re-bindable by any software currently.