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> All Windows laptops come preinstalled, there's no arsing about with drivers there either.

If you’re lucky. One laptop I had in the past (and ultimately returned) had an issue where the vendor-provided NVIDIA drivers were the only ones that allowed its GPU to perform correctly, but were very outdated, which resulted in Windows Update continuously updating them and dragging performance back down. I even tried using the policy editor to lock the drivers in but that failed too because the drivers are split into several pieces and I’d inevitably miss some component, resulting in broken half-updated drivers.

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> you're 100% having to muck about with sketchy kexts

Apple has replaced kexts (kernel extensions) with a user-space alternative for many years now

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Hence

> that almost certainly will break in the next OS release

My scanner has drivers available for download that date from 2015 with no updates since then.

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