Fortunately, this fucking windows partition I only keep for VR with my shitty Oculus Rift CV1 reminds me how fucked up the alternative is. I can't fucking wait to get a Steam Frame and ditch it.
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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The only thing reading something like this does for me is paint the linux community as completely inept and dishonest.
I swapped GPU in windows by downloading the new driver, shut down the pc, swap cards, boot pc that then loads a default windows driver, install the new driver I downloaded, done. If it asks for a reboot, that takes another 20 seconds.
Done.
This is, specifically, the workflow for changing graphics cards manufacturers on windows, e.g. nVidia to AMD. If you're just going from one AMD card to another, or vice versa, generally you can just toss it in and reboot a few times, yes.
GPU manufacturers are fucking awful about actually uninstalling their bloatware shit on windows, and it often (potentially intentionally) interferes with other manufacturer's drivers (and sometimes their own, though that's less common these days.)
Windows Update installed the bare driver for both Green and Red GPUs directly. There’s no additional software needed for either unless you plan to adjust clock and memory speeds or want something specific from the vendor’s software.
I agree that the original post is dishonest, but your solution is exactly the same as what they said with the exception that you knew it would be a problem so you downloaded the driver beforehand. Had you not known that would happen the series of misfortunes could have happened to you too.
I didn’t come here to complain about linux, but the number of distros that give me a black screen after some hardware change or update is more than I can count on two hands. What this post is denying that both userbases have wildly different skill levels because linux generally requires a higher skill level. Windows is over a much more massive userbase that includes people who can’t set the time display on a microwave. And they don’t use linux.
Furthermore, pre-downloading the driver is completely unnecessary as the default windows driver would allow you to continue using the PC and download the correct driver after installation. No “series of misfortunes.”
Can you give me an example of which distro/hardware change gave you a black screen? Because unless it was Gentoo or something you built the kernel yourself a black screen is extremely unlikely. Unlike Windows which requires drivers for everything, in Linux the drivers are baked into the kernel, so any hardware change should just work out of the box (there are some caveats to get the best possible driver, but even the included driver should be more than enough for almost anything except heavy use on Nvidia GPUs).
I agree that on average the Linux user has more technical expertise than the average windows user, but that's mainly because the average user doesn't choose their OS. If you take into consideration only people who actually chose their OS, I think it's very similar.
And OP talked about his experience doing that, the default windows driver gave him a crappy resolution, and he had lots of issues getting the right driver and making it work. You skipped all of those issues because you knew beforehand which was the correct driver, and pre-downloaded it.