Why not? Microsoft isn't a struggling startup. They can afford to do just that.
And if you really can't act responsibly "at scale" then you shouldn't be allowed that scale.
Maybe not, but LG has violated this trust and should therefore be either fined or severely restricted by Microsoft. Banning will likely cause more problems than solutions, but they shouldn't get away with this.
Adware was a huge problem during the Windows XP era, can't believe it's coming back now through Microsoft's official channels.
Also I doubt there's actually millions of hardware vendors. But that aside, Microsoft has a duty to vet everything that they offer through their channels. If it's too expensive for them to do, do like Apple did and have those that want to make use of their distribution network (and trust) pay them.
> after MS implemented precision touchpads somewhere in 2015, and suddenly Windows touchpads became as precise as those on Macs.
There’s still a world of difference between a MacBook touchpad and a windows one. My work laptop (18 month old dell XPS) can’t hold a candle to my 6 year old MacBook’s trackpad.
> Likewise with RGB peripherals. Even GPU driver applications have increasingly become less useful as the most important features—power control, adaptive sync, HDR, etc have moved into native Windows settings.
The peripherals still need the addons though; I have ASUS armory crate, Corsair iCue and MSI center for my Motherboard, cooler and GPU respectively. They all suck.
The latest Dell trackpads are quite bad. Price or the product being premium or not unfortunately does not tell you if it will have a good trackpad or not. And it changes over time (Dell XPS used to have really good trackpads)
Basically you have to go to a store and try or find reviews that actually pay attention to this.
Oddly I've found otherwise (Dell Precision notebook from 2021, and Surface Laptop). It might be macOS's animations and smoothing interfering here, but I've found that my Windows touchpads are much more responsive, especially when swiping between desktops.
> The peripherals still need the addons though
Ugh, this is annoying. Hardware vendors need to be banned from writing lousy, inefficient, unsafe software.
> Ugh, this is annoying. Hardware vendors need to be banned from writing lousy, inefficient, unsafe software.
Yeah, I commented on the McAfee LG thread but the stuff that comes bundled with hardware is embarassing. I don’t know how Razer, Logitech, nvidia, MSI, asus, etc get away with it. The stuff is awful, even their “good” software. I work in games and a few years ago the biggest correlation we had between unexplained crashes/performance problems in the wild was users having MSI Afterburner installed. Users thought it did great things and fixed a bunch of games but it absolutely thrashed everything we worked very hard to do and caused no end of issues doing so.
Well, this is the whole market on its own. It's entrepreneurship. No different than every web SaaS startup trying to capture some entry-level piece of computer use and then constrain it so it interoperates only with their "net of trusted partners".
They get away with it because everyone is happy and making money - the users, notably, are not part of the group here, and have no voice. The users are resources to be exploited. Same as on the web, and on most markets these days.
Other overlay apps like discord https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/1jncrlc/new_ove... have similar issues - the way they work is by drive hooks and drawing over the application; depending on how close you are to the limit and how the game loop is coded this can very easily (and often does) cause micro stuttering, and in cases like discord causes massive performance problems regularly.
My point here is simply that it's not the monitor that is installing this. Neither the malware nor the URLs to malware exist on the device - they get fetched as part of normal OS-side auto-provisioning, which is the part that was compromised.
They are downloading and installing something without the users consent.
It's nice to have drivers work without any intervention, same with "helper software" but along side the ease of use they also took on the responsibility.
If I download some random .exe from the net; I have to confirm that I want to run it, sometimes I even have to right click and unblock it to allow it to run, because it is "untrusted".
Their signature key, their auto-run system, everything done for ease of use means they own this.
Otherwise what does "trusted" mean?
And it's not like MS is too poor to do anything useful for their customers. They just don't want to unless the cost-benefit analysis pans out in their favor. The customer is worth as much as their wallet.
Isn't the debacle over? MS know about this by now. What's stopping them from killing it today?
A late resolution is barely a resolution at all. None of this functionality needs new Windows features.
If you're going to allow 3rd parties to install software on potentially billions of computers with far reaching privileges then you better have something in place other than 'just trust me bro'.
Hard to get worked up over "3rd parties" when even 1st parties cheerfully stomp all over the interests of their users. That ship sailed, caught fire, and sank to the bottom of the ocean the day Candy Crush appeared in the goddamned Start menu.
Self signing a driver should mean just that, not a driver, and a load of other things we feel like foisting on the user.
Half the reason I moved to Linux is because I just wanted to print something without getting a load of advertising from a printer company.
Apple seem to do a pretty decent job of just that
At least on Windows, the most you get is a scare screen saying 'this app is from an unidentified developer'. I know what I'd rather have.
Well that and side-loaded LG adware