Occasionally, you may need to install proprietary drivers your Linux distribution hasn’t provided for you. RELATED: 10 of the Most Popular Linux Distributions Compared It’s a good idea to choose printers you know will work with Linux the next time you go printer-shopping. Printers can be a headache on Linux, and many may not work properly - or at all - no matter what you do. Hardware that doesn’t work is usually just a quick driver download away from working. Unless you have an ancient device that only works with older versions of Windows, the manufacturer has done the work of making it work with Windows. If hardware isn’t working on Windows, there’s usually a driver to make it work. Microsoft doesn’t write these drivers on its own - it gets them from the manufacturers and provides them to you after vetting them. When you plug in a new device to your Windows computer and you see the “Installing Driver” bubble pop up, Windows might be downloading a manufacturer-provided driver from Microsoft and installing it on your PC. Microsoft bundles a lot of these manufacturer-provided drivers with Windows, and hosts many of them on Windows Update.

RELATED: Should You Use the Hardware Drivers Windows Provides, or Download Your Manufacturer's Drivers? When you install Windows, you’ll need to install hardware drivers provided by the hardware’s manufacturer - motherboard chipset drivers, graphics card drivers, Wi-Fi drivers, and more.

Debian driver