aka @JWBananas@startrek.website aka @JWBananas@lemmy.world aka @JWBananas@kbin.social

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Moving down the stack, Unix systems have never been big on supporting arbitrary drivers: remember that Unix systems were typically coupled to specific machines and vendors. NT, on the other hand, intended to be an OS for “any” machine and was sold by a software company, so supporting drivers written by others was critical. As a result, NT came with the Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS), an abstraction to support network card drivers with ease. To this day, manufacturer-supplied drivers are just not a thing on Linux, which leads to interesting contraptions like the ndiswrapper, a very popular shim in the early 2000s to be able to reuse Windows drivers for WiFi cards on Linux.