I guess, all depends on what type of driver you're installing; but I had to install win10 on my brother's PC last week, these are the steps I had to take to install AMD's drivers (because the ones included with windows suck):
Open Edge.
Download Opera (his browser of choice) and install it.
Google "AMD Drivers", go to the website
Lookup the exact model of the processor: "Ryzen 3 3200G".
Try to guess what fucking .exe file to download, since their descriptions are vague.
Double click the .exe.
next, deselect bloatware, next, install.
Error on installation
Lookup error code.
Turns out Windows was downloading (not installing) an update at the same time, without telling me.
Wait 15 minutes for windows to finish doing whatever it wants to do, without user consent.
I don't know why it's become a stigma that installing things on Linux is hard when Windows requires you to Google sketchy .exes and .msis because their app store is so trash. For 99% of packages on Linux you can just open the software manager and click install.
Because Windows doesn't require you to google sketchy .exes and .msis....
Unless you just consider them inherently sketchy, but can't really do anything about that. Hell the backlash for the store was mainly because people wanted to keep using .exes's.
I’m gonna get hate, but I much prefer the independent distribution of exe files over package managers. I’ve still yet to have a good experience with a package manager. Almost all end up with outdated versions of software. My discord broke for a full day because the central arch repo hadn’t updated yet.
That's because laptop (and some desktop motherboard) manufacturers love to cut costs wherever they can so they end up using some weird non standard sound card from Billy Bob's discount computer parts because they know they can require the use of drivers to band aid over the shitty hardware with a software fix.
Then when using Linux it tends to either not work or have shit sound until some kind soul adds in a config file for the devices sound card.
It looks like the OP was trying to shorthand (not show entirely)
->Just updating Ubtuntu to see if it fixes the issue
->cloning a github repo and then trying to build a driver themselves
->Checking with modprobe to see if it worked (I don't remember the command clearly, I've only actually done this once like 2 years ago)
The syntax error at the end is probably more for dramatic effect and would've occurred when trying to make the repo. But at the bare minimum using Apt to update->upgrade your distro would update a driver if it was already installed and just outdated.
Or mainline that shit --- for me, "true" Linux support means drivers are in the mainline kernel, and will Just Work. Not sure I've ever had problems with drivers for an RS232 dongle on Linux, but I definitely have under Windows.
I don't remember the last time I had to manually install a driver on Linux.
But I do remember the last time I had to manually install a driver on Windows. I had to revert the change in safe mode, because it wouldn't boot after the install. To be fair to Windows, it was an old PS/2 to USB adaptor. To be fair to the adaptor, it was plug-and-play on OpenSuse, Mint, and Fedora.
I had Windows literally delete my graphics drivers because it decided to download "new" ones (read: the default fallback driver) and made me unable to play anything. And when I went through the trouble of figuring out how to get AMD's software center to redownload it, Windows did it again.
On an unrelated note, that happened on my second-to-last day of using Windows.
Hahahahahahahaha hell no
My Nvidia experience on windows required me to setup a whole ass nvidia account just to get access to the crappy nvidia software to install the drivers
My Nvidia experience on fedora was sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
Not to mention the utterly useless auto driver install from windows which would either:
fail to find drivers meaning I had to go search for them on google
download the driver release from 2 years ago
use some generic Microsoft driver (goto option 1)
overwrite my manually installed latest driver (goto option 1)
oh, don't mind me, i'm just over here using my graphics tablet that linux came with drivers for and which worked out of the box (including pressure sensing) as soon as i plugged it in, and printing on my printer which CUPS auto-detected and went from new laptop to printing in 30 seconds, and which i have never had any issues with
The votes are a bit weird, because it seems like the conversation in this thread is a bit more middling. I think it's more being upvoted for being in the right community than anything else.