I don't think it's fair to blame the OS for driver crashes. Those are a result of third parties and can happen on any platform.

That varies on the OS/driver/hardware, but IMO, the new AMD graphics drivers being in the kernel tree are the way to go, or something similar like a partnership between MS/AMD/Nvidia.

As a consumer it's incredibly frustrating to have a buggy driver and not know who is responsible. Is it MS? Windows comes with a lot of drivers so blaming MS seems fair. Is it the hardware manufacturer? Sometimes you can get the latest drivers but the OEM hardware isn't quite standard so you're screwed. Is the OEM to blame? Usually, because they have their own driver update system, but then the question is why can't they use the native windows update system?

The current situation on windows seems to be that no one is responsible.

> then the question is why can't they use the native windows update system?

Cynical answer, and I will grant that gpu vendors are less bad than e.g. printer or smartphone drivers, but it just distributes drivers and so doesn't provide all the opportunities to upsell/advertise to/lock in the users that their bundled crap they can pair with the driver with their own installer allows

Many vendors do use the Windows Update system. Looking at my old Windows 10 box, in the last three months it's received display driver updates from Intel and nVidia (it's an Optimus system so yay, twice the driver update joy). It's also got a mouse driver update from something called ELAN.

Also, Windows has this thing called minidrivers where Microsoft essentially writes a chunk of your driver for you (the generic chunk), and you only have to write the bits specific to your device. The idea is that Microsoft could QA their drivers better than J. Random OEM ever could, and so this'd reduce cost for OEMs and also make the Windows platform more stable.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/drivers/ge...

You're making this harder than it needs to be. All Windows drivers are signed. Blame the party that signed the buggy driver.

The point is, users will blame windows because they don't know what a graphics driver is or that they have one, so MS took steps to avoid people thinking windows is buggy. MS has a long history of this, going as far as reproducing bugs.

You sign an executable to attest that it is authentic, not that it is bug-free.