I woke up the other day to a notification that my LG monitor driver was installed, with a little window on how to use the on-screen crap.
Absolutely useless, since the buttons for the monitor are right there on the bottom of it, and probably easier to use than the software.
Apparently the 3 applications have some sort of screen partitioning/sharing capabilities, but it is still unclear if the LG App was remote access or not.
So far, LG is earning a lot of justified bad press. Should have returned it when I had to turn off the screens power-save mode to get it to stop fading out randomly. =3
... and so out of arm's reach, right?
As to why people do install such software? It sometimes provides additional features, controls and settings. For example with touchpad you could set the sensitivity, hot corners, set the scroll behaviour the way you like it, etc.
With monitors you might get a better colour profile (P3 instead of just sRGB), I don't know. I don't use monitors like this.
> Connecting some LG monitors to a Windows PC may automatically install software that promotes McAfee subscriptions
I too have a LG monitor, but haven't booted Windows in some days, guess I'll stay put in my Arch environment until they've fixed this shitshow.
Typically, the Windows update server downloads packages mapped to hardware IDs in the background. Since LG's business in Korea has been failing and their AI efforts are stagnating, they exploited their McAfee partnership marketing as a pipeline. Windows' Plug and Play does make development convenient. The DX experience is good.
Linux is quite fragmented. That's good from a 'my computer' perspective, but not from a 'product' perspective. And then there's the jitter issue. Windows has stable paid solutions, while Linux has version discrepancies.
In fact, the reason Linux is considered secure is simply because hardware vendors haven't standardized enough to build automatic deployment pipelines.
In programming terms, we all know singleton is bad, but for Plug and Play, it's overwhelmingly convenient.
The Linux security model (sudo to install or update software) doesn't allow this. No reputable distribution would include a program that scans hardware identifiers and prompts the user for permission to install proprietary software from a third-party source. This is possible on Windows because of the "universal backdoor," aka Windows Update, with Microsoft's consent.
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.
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.
The monitor only sends a unique device ID, everything else is handled by Windows.
Disabled LG & Switch App in taskmanager auto start, and set to Manual for all 3 LG process names in Services.
A lot of bad karma, for such an buggy monitor that doesn't even work properly till you turn off the silly power-saver auto-dim mode. =3