As such, all manner of monetization has been approved and it will continued to be approved without regard for user experience.
This article obviates that this is not an LG problem, it is a Microsoft problem.
Also, don't fool yourself if you think this won't come to the Linux world.
I don’t think it’s a loss leader but Microsoft gets almost nothing from OEM Windows licenses and basically nobody buys it retail.
This is not coming to the Linux world. The moment this sort of thing happens, distros get forked.
I doubt anyone would bother getting into programming with ms tech unless they just happened to run it on their desktop.
My phone still didn't come with a functional paint or notepad apps. Google docs is a horrible experience on phones (but at least it works now - a few years ago it was straight up unusable).
And you're telling me that this is the only computing platform for a lot of people? How is everything still so unusable about it then?
My experience tells me that everything mobile is basically an afterthought outside of a few dozen websites and I guess phone games.
Not to sound harsh, but you come at this with an somewhat old perspective, the same one I grew up with too and probably also retain too much of.
People don't open their phones looking for something like paint or notepad apps, they want a messenger/social network to connect with their family/friends which is most likely why they got the phone in the first place, and if they're "advanced", they'll even edit their own photos and images but via a whole host of various phone image editors. Sometimes the social network offers those things too, sometimes as separate apps, people use that sort of stuff instead of looking for "paint.exe" or tools to crop/edit images in a more, I guess "crude" way that you and I might be used to and favor still today.
Note-taking works fine, in Google Keep, Apple Notes, or some other cloud equivalent. Yup, your data is in the cloud and owned by one of those tech megacorps, but most people just don't care.
Basic photo editing works okay too, in Google Photos, Apple Photos, etc. Ditto the cloud stuff.
What really makes most desktop users outliers is caring about, or even being aware at all of the concept of, actually owning your own data versus trusting cloud providers for everything.
I think it helped Microsoft historically that people used their operating systems at home, although even then a lot of people would have learned Windows at work or school first.
My macOS-using employer gives much more money to Microsoft than Apple.
Cloud SaaS things they’re using: Entra ID, Power BI, Sharepoint, corporate email (365), OneDrive.
Microsoft applications installed by my employer on my PC: Teams, Office including Outlook, Defender.
Our applications are Java running on Linux and we could migrate 100% of our platform to Azure without any issue if we had a reason to do that.
Yes there are other options: gitlab.com, some project specific gitlab instances (freedesktop for example), forejo / codeberg, and the Linux kernel is off doing it's own thing with mailing lists instead. I even come across code on SourceForge every now and then still. But all of these are super niche.
I genuinely don't know, got curious and went to typescriptlang.org to find some "About" page or "Governance" or something else, but couldn't find anything at all about it. It was exclusively developed by Microsoft for two years, and with no other clear governance/decision structure today as far as I can see, doesn't that exactly mean that Microsoft controls the entire "organization"? It's not clear what "organization" you're referring to either, the GitHub organization? I'd assume that's also 100% Microsoft controlled.
I installed Debian 13 recently. The first time I opened Firefox ESR (installed by default), I got something that looked like adverts on the home page (banner blindness means I have no memory of what they actually were, only of the feeling of disgust). The Home section of the Settings page had options for "Sponsored shortcuts" and "Sponsored stories" enabled by default. Changing a default setting is a lot easier than forking software, yet it was not done.
This is also why the bazaar model of Linux distributions is beneficial. You get more choice.
I think literally the only driver I’ve installed for any accessory of any kind is the config utility for a Stream Deck. I certainly never install mouse (thank you Steermouse!) or printer drivers, let alone a monitor driver of all things.
I'm curious what you mean by this. I'm not necessarily rejecting the point, but I also don't see how this could happen without substantial shifts in the industry first.
Traditional CADT means features get lost over time.
It is not immune from these forces, just not a focus by the powers that be. Fewer developers remember the good old days of Y2Kas as well, meaning they don’t resist these forces instinctively, since they grew up in iOS captivity.
https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch/wiki/monitor-method...
This has been a feature since Windows 7, and it worked great since it would pull all necessary drivers after installation without you going hunting on the internet like in the Windows XP days.
Just that no HW manufacturer thought to push spyware in their driver repos at that point to improve some team's KPIs.
A driver shouldn't be a front-facing program that shows ads of any kind. It should be sandboxed and follow strict APIs to talk to the OS and that's it - any extra options should be shown inline in the main e.g. printer or mouse dialog.
Actually, why not? The driver could declare a list/tree of extra configurable options, and windows could generate a configuration dialog for them. I think this is already is thing in Windows for NICs, I remember seeing TCP offload options when I go into properties for a NIC in the device manager.
You just need to make it a bit more accessible to non-tech users and with more modern control options such as colour wheels for RGB.
And the Linux software for these sort of devices (when such software exist) don't tend to be as bloated. Usually the driver just exposes some control files under /sys and someone else builds a GUI or such on top. But there is no reason you couldn't also expose a schema that describes what the options do to make a more generic GUI for those.
On Windows out of the box they kind of work, but you really need a manufacturer's software suite to take full advantage of them, and that software suite is, surprise, an advertising and analytics platform, a situation I think both Microsoft and the peripheral manufacturers are very happy with.
What we're saying is this shouldn't be allowed by the OS to begin with. Not to merely use the peripheral in any case.
Whether Microsoft is happy with allowing it, is another matter.
Perhaps some law accompanied with hefty fines can make them less happy doing it.
Many generations of Roccat peripherals were usable this way on Linux, thanks to the work of one generous volunteer who reverse-engineered them.
Companies like Logitech don't store their devices' configs in firmware in a way that "forces" you to run some additional shit to use all of their features (some features aren't implemented in software). It's a convenient excuse that allows them to push their spyware onto users, but it's totally unnecessary.
A vendor that was actually "user friendly" in the deep sense (opposite of "user hostile") would do this themselves; configuration would be upstream-first via libratbagd or whatever, and then they'd provide their own configuration interface as a value-add for a uniform cross-platform experience, or in areas where they thought they could provide a better UI than the design principles of KDE and GNOME, or so that they could have a uniform interface to refer to in their documentation.
Yes. Via some standard protocol to show checkboxes, radio buttons, drop down selections, etc.
Windows users think of the driver as what makes the hardware do what everything in its class does but subtly different and somehow glued to a command center with its own unique and bad GUI auto started, in the tray, with its own update schedule, and ads.
There was a good keynote on the topic 5 years ago By Timothy Roscoe
https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke...
Imo, the only thing Microsoft can meaningfully do here from their side is threaten LG with pulling all their drivers if they keep doing this.
I can't imagine the group doing this validation is sufficiently manned/funded; it's a cost centre, and the effects of cutting it don't show up for years.
I'm not surprised that the driver got approved, especially if the previous versions already had some user UI and this update "just" added the ads. What I would hope now is for MS to either pull the updated driver or ask LG to roll the change back themselves, possibly under the thread of pulling their drivers altogether (iirc they done that with other companies in the past).
The problems tend to be in the userspace software that's also installed with the driver. Sometimes there's also some pretty derpy stuff where the driver wants to talk to the userspace software but there's no validation/verification and that opens up a big hole.
Second, we're not talking about the drivers per se, as those aren't what shows you ads, it's the configuration software and accompanying crapware. Did you get that? I'm guessing no, based on your comment.
Third, there are capability-based kernels, microkernels, drivers that are allowed into as restricted bytecode, IOMMU, and several other layers of security. Do you know that? I'm guessing no, based on your comment.
Though there is a limit to how much you can effectively sandbox a driver for most devices. They do have a point even if they made it badly. I know you listed some methods but they don't generalize to arbitrary devices very well.
>Though there is a limit to how much you can effectively sandbox a driver for most devices. They do have a point even if they made it badly. I know you listed some methods but they don't generalize to arbitrary devices very well.
Likely not, but the rarer cases could always be exceptions.
Most devices, screens, printers, mice, audiocards, etc should not have to go through this, at least not for basic functioning.
Which is why I like e.g. "class compliant" devices for example, whereas the configurations can be managed directly from the OS with no third party driver loaded. Some of those do come with the custom proprietary driver, but for most I don't even bother installing it.
Except for every printer, some popular GPUs, Microsoft's peripherals...