> As an aside, Microsoft fought in court to force OEMs to not install this crap alongside Windows (reasonably since it was damaging their brand and making the machines less secure), but they lost.
One of the greatest losses from the retail Microsoft Store shutdown was the loss of Microsoft's "Signature Edition" PC program. They only sold in their Stores PCs with clean Windows installs, which they labeled "Signature Edition". Many of the OEMS participated (Dell, Lenovo, others), and generally when you could directly compare Signature Edition models to their regular direct from the OEM counterparts (which the companies model naming/numbering schemes often intentionally tried to make hard to do) it was often about a $50 premium over the "full of junk installed" PC (showing about how much all that bloatware is valuable to the OEMs if it subsidizes machines by about $50).
For a brief period it even looked like other retailers might adopt Signature Edition sales and you could even walk into a Staples or a Best Buy and find sales people that could source Signature Edition machines, for the people that still liked to try to deal shop between multiple retail stores.
I miss being able to give the advice "buy whatever computer you want from Microsoft Store, or if you go to Staples/Best Buy keep asking sales people until you meet the person that knows what Signature Edition means and you generally won't have any problems with the machine".
Now the advice is back to "buy a Surface from Microsoft or be prepared to spend a couple hours using the Windows Fresh Start tool from Microsoft first".
The best thing about Windows now is that once you've registered your machine via their online tool, reregistering after a clean install is the click of a button.
They have a windows 10 builder tool that downloads the ISO and burns it to USB or DVD. So there's not much stopping a customer from registering and then doing a crapware-free clean install. The downside (besides needing the skill and time to do it) is you'll lose any baked in freeware but the line between freeware, trialware and crapware is so thin now I'm not sure that's a concern.
> The best thing about Windows now is that once you've registered your machine via their online tool, reregistering after a clean install is the click of a button.
> They have a windows 10 builder tool that downloads the ISO and burns it to USB or DVD. So there's not much stopping a customer from registering and then doing a crapware-free clean install. The downside (besides needing the skill and time to do it) is you'll lose any baked in freeware but the line between freeware, trialware and crapware is so thin now I'm not sure that's a concern.
And the best thing about your computer is that it's so complicated that a determined manufacturer like Lenovo can hide their crapware installers in, say, the UEFI. Which will then automatically install them on a fresh OS install.
You make the mistake of thinking that you own your computer. You do not.
I found this out with my ASUS motherboard on my desktop. There's a UEFI option which bootstraps an automatic installation of their own software called Armory Crate which then invokes itself to install a load of "junk".
1. The post I was replying to was about how Windows was great.
2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.
> 1. The post I was replying to was about how Windows was great.
Ah sorry, I got lost in the the thread hierarchy.
> 2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.
Yes, I do. I guess other than CPU microcode and other such stuffs that I can't reasonably get around.
Please don't misunderstand my post starting "the best thing about Windows..." as an overall endorsement of Windows. I didn't mean it to be read that way. I was just saying it's more convenient to have a clean install, although as you pointed out UEFI shenanigans can counteract that, so thank you for that.
>2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.
I ran openbsd for decades, bought every release dvd, a few t-shirts and did my best to own my hardware. The only reason I don't run it now is their networking stack can't sustain gigabit speeds on the firewall hardware I use. Freebsd can't either, but it gets much closer. More than double the performance, actually. At least for me, it'll have to do.
I'm not the person you replied to, but to answer your second question myself, yes, I do. I have four desktop PCs (one for each of my family members including myself), a netbook, and a custom built router in my house. All run Linux except the router, which runs a flavor of BSD. The Linux computers use AMD graphics with the open source AMDGPU driver. No Windows PCs[0], no blob drivers. Works quite well in practice.
[0]: My work laptop runs Windows 10, because they issued it, administer it, and own it. I'm required to use their software baseline for working.
I'm not a free software zelot or anything, but I do this on my desktop and its not too difficult. As far as I can tell they're aren't any binary blob drivers to install anyway and the standard linux drivers work great.
WHQL standards _should_ mean that for any PC purchase today (and many in the last decade or so) Windows Update will always have the most up-to-date "basic driver" on its servers.
There's some controversy (linked elsewhere in this thread) that those basic drivers are allowed by Microsoft to advertise their "full bloat" versions in notifications and launch time popups. The flipside to that controversy is that if you want the "full bloat" versions (such as the Geforce Experience if you are a game player), that makes it easy to acquire them as it is general a case of go through the notifications and popups on first launch, from what I've seen.
I don’t believe you would, drivers come in via windows update in modern windows. You should at worst miss cutting edge versions made available on the manufacturers website prior to arriving on windows update.
It seems that Microsoft learned that advertising (and crapware pre-installs) is so profitable, they just bake it right into the Start menu as of Windows 10. Oh and let's add telemetry as well.
Telemetry in Windows has been out of the box since Windows XP. Whether you are correct or not to be antagonistic about it, that ship sailed a long time before Windows 10 and current HN hysteria about it is almost funny (especially given how often articles about telemetry driven development and A/B testing get upvoted on HN when a startup is doing it).
You can turn off the advertising ("Suggestions") and as long as the bundled "crapware" remains UWP sandboxed, it is a far cry from most of what the OEMs have been accused of.
The "Google Play Edition" Android phones were probably closer in concept: standard OEM hardware, but sold through the OS vendor's retail channels with a 'clean' software configuration.
Then there's Android One, but that is an absolute disaster at this point, with unoptimized software and updates that brick phones. Google themselves haven't been doing too good on software reliability this year; just look at Android 11, especially on the Pixel 2 and 4a. Both have huge bugs and in the 2's case, they will never be fixed. And some Android 11 bugs won't be fixed until Android 12 comes out.
I'm seriously considering a switch to iOS at this point.
I really like my Android One Nokia 6.1. It was a little rough for the first 6 months with random slowdowns and stuttering after being on for more than a few days (fixed with a reboot) but since then it has been great.
Admittedly it has a rubbish camera but I don't really take pictures so that's fine with me. For a £200 phone it has been just as good for my needs as every flagship nexus/pixel I've owned asside from the crap camera.
It's got to the point that it'll be out of support soon and I'm having a hard time finding a decent replacement for anything near a comparable price.
> Admittedly it has a rubbish camera but I don't really take pictures so that's fine with me.
That makes me sad to hear. One of my favorite things about the old Nokia (especially the Lumia series) was that they cared about having good camera hardware. The low end stuff was better than most of the other brands I tried, and if you got something with PureView...
Looking at the latest lineup the cameras are probably better now, they all have the standard array of multiple cameras on the back. Personally I couldn't care less for cameras on phones so a big camera bump is kinda a downside for me!
One of the greatest losses from the retail Microsoft Store shutdown was the loss of Microsoft's "Signature Edition" PC program. They only sold in their Stores PCs with clean Windows installs, which they labeled "Signature Edition". Many of the OEMS participated (Dell, Lenovo, others), and generally when you could directly compare Signature Edition models to their regular direct from the OEM counterparts (which the companies model naming/numbering schemes often intentionally tried to make hard to do) it was often about a $50 premium over the "full of junk installed" PC (showing about how much all that bloatware is valuable to the OEMs if it subsidizes machines by about $50).
For a brief period it even looked like other retailers might adopt Signature Edition sales and you could even walk into a Staples or a Best Buy and find sales people that could source Signature Edition machines, for the people that still liked to try to deal shop between multiple retail stores.
I miss being able to give the advice "buy whatever computer you want from Microsoft Store, or if you go to Staples/Best Buy keep asking sales people until you meet the person that knows what Signature Edition means and you generally won't have any problems with the machine".
Now the advice is back to "buy a Surface from Microsoft or be prepared to spend a couple hours using the Windows Fresh Start tool from Microsoft first".