> simply because hardware vendors haven't standardized enough to build automatic deployment pipelines

Wouldn't it require cooperation from the distros anyway? You say "HDMI and DP also have two-way communication channels", but that doesn't force the OS to communicate over those channels. And it also doesn't force the "mapping of packages to hardware IDs" to be what the hardware manufacturer wants it to be.

Your point is idealistically correct, but realistically it's not. Because when people install Windows, they don't want to go through the process of installing drivers for other hardware devices. And usually the driver versions depend on the OS version too.

Right away, with numerous distributions like Ubuntu and Arch, it's hard to account for all the possible cases from a production standpoint. But Windows has very few versions. As long as you pass Microsoft's standard specification, it just runs on Windows. That difference is huge. What you're saying is ideal, but when selling a product, time is money.

In other words, to summarize our conversation:

'As you said, separating them is the right thing to do. But UX Uesrs basically wanted that kind of deployment authority, and in the process, the problem of abusing it arose.'

It's a beginner level problem, but at the same time, it's also a difficult one.