On Fri, 5 Oct 2018 02:48:35 -0700
William Morder <doctor_contendo@...> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Friday 05 October 2018 00:19:47 Felmon Davis wrote:
> > On Thu, 4 Oct 2018, J Leslie Turriff wrote:
> > > On 2018-10-01 14:21:14 Kate Draven wrote:
> > >
> > > [ ... deleted ... ]
> > >
> > >> As for drivers,what do you mean? I've never had to install drivers. I
> > >> HAVE had to install them in Apple and MS. That's a nightmare. Perhaps
> > >> I'm mistunderstood (which is likely).
> > >
> > > 	The only ones I know of are the video drivers (which are optional).
> > >
> > > Leslie
> >
> > not sure what counts as a 'driver' but I have had to install some
> > package for Brother printers and 'firmware' for wifi (Intel).
> >
> > if this is just a matter of semantics then let's not fuss.
> >
> > the fact remains that for some it's not all "out of the box" or
> > whatever to call it.
> >
> > f.
> 
> Maybe what was meant was dependencies rather than drivers? Brother printers, 
> and other such items, are special cases, because one doesn't get the deb 
> packages (or rpm, yum, etc., according to the distro) from the standard 
> repositories, but must download them from the manufacturer's website. (I, 
> too, wrestle with a Brother printer.) There, perhaps, one means to say 
> drivers, even if they are deb packages. 
> 
> When I read the word *driver*, however, I immediately thought that it sounded 
> more like a Windoze or rotten Apple user, who had recently switched to Linux, 
> and was unfamiliar with the repositories, or how to use apt. If we knew more, 
> we might be able to make suggestions, or offer other help. 

Um, no, "driver"--a piece of software that makes it possible to communicate with
a piece of hardware--is the correct term, and you're using them all the time in Linux,
too.  It's just that most of the more common ones are treated as part of the kernel
(or of CUPS and its supporting packages), so you never notice them.

There are a lot of drivers that are or have been maintained outside the kernel, though,
and these often have to be installed separately.  The printer drivers and the proprietary 
3D acceleration drivers for nVidia and AMD are the most common, but there are 
others:  drivers for network equipment, modems, smartcard readers, crypto dongles, 
game controllers, and other oddly specific hardware that most people never run
into.  They may or may not be in your distro's repositories, depending on who wrote
the driver, what the distro's position on proprietary code is, and other factors.

I'm currently running an externally packaged driver for my motherboard's internal
sensor chip, because support for the it87 family of chips has been slow in reaching the 
kernel.

TL;DR:  drivers have always been in Linux, too, and they're not going anywhere.

E. Liddell