Microsoft provided drivers for the standard PC hardware that was in my 2006 Core Duo Mac Mini and Windows 7 recognized all of my hardware - usb, sound, graphics, Bluetooth, Ethernet etc.

Microsoft goes out of its way to provide drivers for the most popular PC hardware. Mac OS is Unix (i.e certified by the Open Grouo) and doesn't have that problem.

Edit Rant:

But why are printer drivers still a thing? Apple introduced AirPrint for iOS 4 back in 2010 and for MacOS a few years later. I never have to worry about printer drivers when I update my OS. New printers bought in 2017 work perfectly with my 7 year old iPad without having to worry about drivers.

Have you looked at the unimaginable amount of crap a typical Windows printer driver forces upon you? It's not just the driver, it's usually also a stripped down license of some image editor, an "update agent" (because Windows 7 does not have an "app store" or a centralized driver distribution that does not phone home like Windows Update does and often enough carries fossilized drivers only), a toolbar for multifunction printers, a watcher that nags you to buy new original cartridges, a scanner agent because there is still no standard for scanning without drivers, much less so over network or cross platform, a selection of adware... and God help you if you have printers or MFDs from different vendors.

The only way to not have this ridiculous mess is buying enterprise printers - for example, the Z2100 plotter drivers are 4MB for Windows, and 16MB for the manager app, while the Photosmart printer driver can only be had as a part of a 145MB download, there is no such thing as a "driver only" package in the consumer space. In enterprise environments (or small offices) the situation sucks even more because you can't really deploy them via GPO, you have to extract the drivers by hand.

And for most of the consumer gear from HP it's the same: even for really old stuff you can find new tanks/cartridges, drivers for new and old OSes and I've yet to see a HP printer fail in a way I could not fix myself with a service manual.

My response to anything HP that wasn't good-sized obviously-business-targeted printers became "I can probably make that work, but it's going to cost you more in my time fiddling around with it than just getting a more appropriate printer."

That and apart from an initial few months of unstable GFX drivers, was utterly solid.

On a side-note, I believe Core Duo2's was the last Intel chips to not include any form of inbuilt `management` silicon and as such,still favoured by some paranoid/security prudent types.

Yes. I go out of my way to run a clean crap free Windows PC. Even going as far as either buying from the business line of laptops or buying from the Microsoft store. But the minute I install a printer driver....

It's even worse for people like my parents, they search online for printer driver and usually end up downloading crapware from a third party site unaffiliated with the printer manufacture.

Won't help as much if you want color though, particularly inkjet color.

And for your parents, see if they're putting the current year on searches - on Bing and DDG that ends (or did end recently) in much worse results because the original sites often don't include dates but malicious ones have all the same keywords plus the year. In my recent experience adding the year meant > 90% malware results on the first page.

Google was much better about this a month or two back.

Regardless of stable driver API or not, it is up to the OEMs to make it happen, if they actually cared about it.

I am pretty negative about Project Treble, it won't change anything, because only Oreo devices have it (0.3% currently) and OEMs are still expected to be the ones pushing the updates.

Usually I hear that sort of thing and think somebody isn't being creative enough with fallback behaviors for when the feature isn't there, but I guess it would depend heavily on what the feature is.

Isn’t that the purpose of a device tree?

It is primarily to allow the drivers linked in the kernel to detect whether they should load and try to talk to hardware. It doesn't replace bus enumeration when running on totally unknown hardware.

I own Crappy unupdated Android one of. And the drivers use the Linux kernel. Last I checked, they need to release source for their drivers.

So where is it? And why can't we upstream those patches and "fix" android?

The OEM never releases the source.

And courts have decided that it's not enough if you have some contributions to the kernel yourself or are a user to force them to release it, you have to have made significant contributions to force them to release it via the courts.

And Torvalds and the major kernel maintainers all refuse to enforce the GPL, and actively campaign against doing so.

Two questions: why? and why use the GPL if you’re not going to enforce it?

On most phones, there are zero external kernel modules loaded. The SoC vendor bakes it all into the ketnel, and the OEM gets the kernel as a blob. Which means all of it is subject to the GPL.

But this was my main area of attack. You compiled the drivers directly into the kernel. Making it all GPL. Now, as a strict reading, I have to have the device to make the request. That's not difficult. Ive phones from a lot of US named companies.

I just want the rights enumerated in the GPL as granted to end users. I'm no kernel maintainer. Just a cranky person who wants the GPL enforced as any license.

Yeah, it turns out it’s not that easily enforcable. There are still court cases going on, but the current legal situation seems to be that unless you’ve contributed significant code to the kernel, you have no legal leg to stand on.

Because the OEM is simply saying "yes, we violated the GPL, and infringed the copyright of the developers", but the only ones who could sue against that would be devs that contributed significant amounts of code.

It's a lot of work, who is supposed to do that?

Some bits of the N900 kernel are still in the process of being upstreamed afaik.

The source helps little since it's just opaque garbage with little to no meaning.