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Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

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Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#71

Post by Silhouette »

app4soft wrote: post #48
qppo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is Windows and MacOS for users that want a computer that works. FOSS alternatives are for developers and power users that want a computer like someone wants a project car. I say this as a happy Linux user at home. But I need to use Windows for work because of multiple programs that do not run on any other target. In school (this has changed a bit) I need to use Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. At home I s…

> But I need to use Windows for work because of multiple programs that do not run on any other target. > At home I still have to dual boot Windows to play games with my friends. In most cases you may execute such programs & games under Linux via WINE (+ Mono, PlayOnLinux, Winetricks; if needed).[0] > In school (this has changed a bit) I need to use Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. Use LibreOffice Impress , Calc…

In some cases you can run things under WINE, and they work or mostly work. Unfortunately, in plenty more cases, you can't. That goes for games, creative software, business admin tools, and just about anything else.

And while LibreOffice isn't bad as an office suite in its own right, MS Office is the still de facto standard in many lines of work, and being 95% compatible when you export as an Excel spreadsheet or Word document just doesn't cut it for professional use.

Until not just Windows but also the major software packages that run on it are no longer the dominant standards, it's always going to be an uphill battle moving normal people onto an alternative platform like Linux, and one that often can't be won today.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#72

Post by cpgxiii »

dcuthbertson wrote: post #66
cpgxiii wrote: post #44

The title is a gross exaggeration of the policy change MS is making. Come 2021, what will go away is the ability to sign drivers for Windows 7 and 8 without passing WHQL/HLK compliance tests. That's it. You can still update compliant drivers, and you can still ship unsigned drivers if your users are willing to disable signing (not great, but there are plenty of shitty vendors who do this already). Are there some numb…

> You can still update compliant drivers If your customers aren't willing to install unsigned drivers (and none of mine are), then the new driver will have to be put through the HLK tests and submitted to Msft for signing. My issue isn't so much the testing/signing process, but that I've had an HCK test suite setup for the past 4 years that has worked just fine. It will have to be replaced w/an HLK test setup, the re…

I will absolutely denigrate vendors who lag behind on driver quality and support, particularly vendors who sell expensive equipment tied to ancient and shitty drivers who can't be bothered to update them support new Windows versions.

Outside of a small set of drivers that WHQL/HLK testing may not work for, an unsigned driver means (1) the vendor doesn't care (i.e. "sold you expensive equipment and have you by the balls") and/or (2) the driver is a horrible buggy stability and security nightmare.

> A lot of us really care about the quality of our drivers and our customer's experience.

And for almost everyone, that means WHQL compliance.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#73

Post by ComputerGuru »

dvdkon wrote: post #31
ComputerGuru wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working video support (without hardware acceleration) out of the box without any external drivers for all current and future graphics cards because they actually implement the “core” vga spec (plus all the official and unofficial revisions to get higher resolutions working). We have to ship updates to our bootable Linux and BSD applications every six months just so customers don’t get stuck in text mode, or worse yet…

My go-to solution to booting an older Linux version on a newer GPU is `nomodeset` and possibly other flags that force-disable the use of device-specific drivers. I don't see how this is different on Windows.

That wasn’t a hypothetical, and yes, I looked for simple kernel cmdline parameters before hacking away at the VGA and UEFI framebuffer drivers in the kernel.

I’m not talking about KMS, that’s another ballgame altogether. You ship a fixed image starting up on unknown hardware that could have any card from 1999 to 2020 in it. You can’t load all drivers at startup because a) that’s crazy talk, b) many can’t be loaded simultaneously anyway. You can manually identify the VID and PID and create a database but it’s a monumental task, and you’re bound to miss some (and what about new releases?). You don’t want to ship with every driver under the sun anyway, because that’s huge, there are licensing issues, and many are buggy or error prone on recent kernel releases. All you want is a basic driver to give you a software-accelerated framebuffer and use the generic VGA/SVGA/XVGA/whatever standards to init the hardware, give you a workable resolution for GUI mode applications, query the monitor and use the EDID database to select a resolution and refresh rate supported by both the hardware and the attached display device, use the correct aspect ratio, avoid overscan or unnecessary scaling, etc. and give you an abstraction supported by your desktop environment including the window manager and your applications, without needing to hack away at every program you ship with to get them to support the sw framebuffer.

Xfree86 was such an effort but a) it’s long dead, and b) never really got there.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#74

Post by pak9rabid »

jeffhou wrote: post #69
driverdan wrote: post #55

Yet another reason why centralized code signing is anti-user and a net negative. You should be able to easily install anything you want on your computer.

Allowing unsigned drivers to be installed by the general user base seems more anti-user, no? My naive understanding is that drivers are low-level and thus malicious drivers would have more net negative impact on an unsuspecting non-technical user (relative to a piece of malicious non-driver code).

Not to mention that if a user really wants to, they can install unsigned drivers.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#75

Post by TillE »

cpgxiii wrote: post #72
dcuthbertson wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can still update compliant drivers If your customers aren't willing to install unsigned drivers (and none of mine are), then the new driver will have to be put through the HLK tests and submitted to Msft for signing. My issue isn't so much the testing/signing process, but that I've had an HCK test suite setup for the past 4 years that has worked just fine. It will have to be replaced w/an HLK test setup, the re…

I will absolutely denigrate vendors who lag behind on driver quality and support, particularly vendors who sell expensive equipment tied to ancient and shitty drivers who can't be bothered to update them support new Windows versions. Outside of a small set of drivers that WHQL/HLK testing may not work for, an unsigned driver means (1) the vendor doesn't care (i.e. "sold you expensive equipment and have you by the bal…

> almost everyone

A 95% solution which completely fails to account for the remaining 5% is an enormous problem. As the article explains, HLK testing isn't really designed for non-hardware drivers and the solutions are strange at best.

You're not actually improving quality in this case, you're just making us do convoluted busywork.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#76

Post by tsimionescu »

matoro wrote: post #58
tsimionescu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there more people releasing drivers for Linux 2.6 or 3.9 (the versions released ~when Win 7 and Win 8 launched respectively)? Or for OpenBSD 4.4? I think the state of support for Linux and open source in general is much, much worse than for commercial software. No one is maintaining >10 year old software. Especially not for free. Do note that this is not a story about not being able to run Win 7 anymore - it's si…

Yes? RHEL 6 uses kernel 2.6 and RHEL 7 uses kernel 3.10. Both are actively maintained and supported.

They are maintained and supported by RedHat, but you can't find for example AMD Radeon drivers for their latest generation for RHEL6 (though they do have them for RHEL 7.9).

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#77

Post by kd913 »

matoro wrote: post #58
tsimionescu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there more people releasing drivers for Linux 2.6 or 3.9 (the versions released ~when Win 7 and Win 8 launched respectively)? Or for OpenBSD 4.4? I think the state of support for Linux and open source in general is much, much worse than for commercial software. No one is maintaining >10 year old software. Especially not for free. Do note that this is not a story about not being able to run Win 7 anymore - it's si…

Yes? RHEL 6 uses kernel 2.6 and RHEL 7 uses kernel 3.10. Both are actively maintained and supported.

Rhel 6 is moving to extended life phase in another month. At that point no bug fixes, security fixes, hardware enablement or root-cause analysis

I wouldn't say that is actively maintained or supported.

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#79

Post by qppo »

app4soft wrote: post #48
qppo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is Windows and MacOS for users that want a computer that works. FOSS alternatives are for developers and power users that want a computer like someone wants a project car. I say this as a happy Linux user at home. But I need to use Windows for work because of multiple programs that do not run on any other target. In school (this has changed a bit) I need to use Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. At home I s…

> But I need to use Windows for work because of multiple programs that do not run on any other target. > At home I still have to dual boot Windows to play games with my friends. In most cases you may execute such programs & games under Linux via WINE (+ Mono, PlayOnLinux, Winetricks; if needed).[0] > In school (this has changed a bit) I need to use Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word. Use LibreOffice Impress , Calc…

You don't understand what I'm talking about.

Wine does not solve my problems, especially when DRM or anticheat is involved. It also doesn't work well on HDPI monitors. I have a few ancient Windows programs I've tried to use in Wine that are very hard to read on a 4K monitor, while on Windows they look fine. It would have been ok 10 years ago, but not for my eyes today

When I say "needed to use" it's not synonymous with "there was no other software with similar functionality." It means "I need to create and share documents or files with colleagues, fellow students, and professors, as well as work with them in the same room." LibreOffice is not the solution to this problem, GSuite is. Partially.

Before getting snarky, I encourage you to think a bit more critically about what it entails for non-power user to get up to speed on Linux. The command line is out of the question, reconfiguring a host of config files or buried options and googling through Ubuntu and stack overflow posts isn't a solution, and constantly tweaking things just to get to a point where "double click this icon" works isn't a solution when on windows and MacOS you don't have those issues.

That's what I mean by "there isn't an alternative."

Re: Microsoft: No Driver Updates Allowed for Win7 and Win8

#80

Post by GoblinSlayer »

kibwen wrote: post #13
bigbubba wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is often the case, the article renders fine with JavaScript and CSS disabled. This sort of scenario is why I run uMatrix in whitelist mode, with JS/CSS always disabled by default. These technologies are net negatives to me, I only enable them on select websites and my browsing experience is more pleasant on average because of it.

JS sure, but what benefit comes from disabling CSS? This is the first time I've heard of anyone doing so.

Incompetent web design. CSS is a powerful tool of destruction, by taking it away from webdevs the web becomes much less broken.
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