There are already some great comments in that thread, like this thoughtful one:
While having a well organized and updated driver catalog is undoubtedly a good thing, please spare a thought for curators of vintage PC collections. The Windows Update Driver catalog is a near unrivaled resource on the internet for known good drivers, and is a great source for drivers where the original manufactures have either removed the drivers from their own websites, or they no longer exist.
Personally I always hated the idea of using Windows Update as your warehouse for drivers in the first place. Much better to keep your own collection. (Yes, it takes some work to curate and periodically update).
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-SoundBlaster-AWE32
There is no strict guarantee of indefinite support, but that is often what happens.
But realistically, unless you're doing serious retrocomputing, it might never come up. I think most 20yo laptops, for example, will simply work with the latest Debian.
(I'm typing this on a 13yo laptop, because real keyboard, and everything works perfectly.)
Linux being open source completely enables that possibility where otherwise you'd be screwed.
Nothing. Nothing does.
If you still have the drivers handy - sure. I personally would trust older versions of Linux more than older versions of Windows though. And I say that as someone that is also typing this comment from a Windows desktop.
Newer old versions rely on Microsoft to activate them. Given the trajectory the indistry is moving toward, I don't have a lot of confidence that will last indefinitely.
More and more features these days are getting inextricably tied to the cloud, and it's becoming trickier to create offline installation media even for the ones that aren't.
The word "could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. If my 20+ year old HW doesn't work on my latest Ubuntu, then the word "could" offers me no comfort.
>Not so in the Windows world.
I can install 20+ year old drivers on Windows 11 no problem without the original author needing to change anything or any motivated individual picking up the slack.
Software is a liability. Especially the typical kind, that one normally runs into, which are not formally verified. And even if they were, the human understanding of what constitutes a vulnerability is in perpetual flux, as that is a human-level semantic concept.
This is why active maintenance is a necessary property. If a software is not actively maintained, it can and will accumulate vulnerability discoveries, putting the entire security boundary it resides in and all the data going through it into jeopardy. To potentially autonomously distribute knowingly unmaintained software borders on malicious.
It sucks that your legacy devices will no longer have their device drivers neatly auto-installed, yes, but it's not some grand conspiracy, it's bottom of the barrel bare minimum safety consciousness.
If what you propose is that manual install specifically should still be possible from Windows Update, I can support that, but I think this entire announcement is such an obvious thing, I'm surprised it hasn't been this way before.
> Personally I always hated the idea of using Windows Update as your warehouse for drivers in the first place. Much better to keep your own collection. (Yes, it takes some work to curate and periodically update).
And most every other person hates dealing with drivers instead, hence why they started distributing them through it.
Suddenly every company would be putting loads more effort into battle testing their drivers when there is a financial cost to buggy code.
Business is usually willing to give up control if it directly increases profits.
I blame the manufacturers for failing to deliver stable products, rather than putting all the blame on windows for delivering drivers to you that were submitted to them by the manufacturer through WHQL arrangements.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/disabl...
Is there even a UI for a user to select an older driver version from windows update?? I know you can do it if you manually get a .inf file, but thats a different flow.
If not, what exactly is this announcement saying? "Stuff that a user isn't able to install right now won't be available for a user to install in the future"?
I guess it comes down to the question of how much MS cares about old hard/software past its support window, versus delegating that to third party sites like vogons.org and praying someone has the relevant file still available.
However, I don't think filtering old drivers is a good way to combat this. Instead they should be popping up a dialog saying "Do you really want to install this USB joystick last sold in 1998? Older devices can pose security risks. If so, please enter your admin password to confirm. If you did not just plug in a USB Joystick, please [report it]."
Drivers for other random things like disk controllers are likely to be a lot older.
I can't recall ever checking a WU provided driver and not having to immediately go fetch an updated version from the vendor directly.
The first phase targets legacy drivers that have newer replacements already on Windows Update."
It'd be useful if they listed information about the other phases; the proposal for this phase seems pretty sensible and I'm surprised they have only now started thinking about it.
Why do we still need thousands of proprietary drivers, when just one will do?
We do the eavesdropping and act as a liability shield. Here's our "debug" mode and a bit extra for the effort.