Workaround:
gpedit.msc
Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Device Installation
Prevent automatic download of applications associated with device metadata
Set to enabled
OK
sysdm.cpl
Hardware tab
Click Device Installation Settings
Under 'Do you want to automatically download manufacturers' apps for your devices?', select 'No'
Save Changes
Worth noting that gpedit.msc isn't included in Windows Home editions (although there are unsupported ways of adding it). This is also technically asking a lot for working around issues that shouldn't exist.
Microsoft needs to intervene here, this cannot be a normal expectation for using their product.
> Microsoft needs to intervene here
Yeah, they've never pushed ads or installed software without the user's consent.
Me on Windows 7: I don't want to use Linux, you have to keep configuring every single thing so it works.
Me on Linux: I don't want to use Windows, you have to keep configuring every single thing so it doesn't show ads.
Linux usability has come a long way in recent years. I switched full time to Linux in 2006, but I can absolutely understand those who wouldn't back then.
These days? Unless there is a specific piece of software that can't run on Linux (or under Wine), and there is no suitable replacement for it? Yeah I don't know why you would voluntarily stay on Windows (note voluntarily, if IT policy says you must that doesn't count).
Accessibility.
All accessibility stacks sucks in some respect, but Linux's sucks most of all, and Wayland people in particular don't seem to be willing to compromise on security (which is required for accessibility to work).
It's a matter of investment. I do not see anything fundamental dealbreaker in Wayland's security model to support and enable accessibility. It probably just needs investment in engineering to find correct interfaces and ways to do it.
Touch goes in there as well. I don't know how they add a new touch keyboard to KDE and have no access to arrow keys. Making it impossible to go up in the terminal.
https://i.imgur.com/nOgLqHU.png
Oof, please report that as an issue (if it hasn't been done already). KDE uses https://bugs.kde.org
QEMU is also a good option for Windows software that won't run on Wine. Unless you explicitly pass through a peripheral, Windows won't see it and start downloading malware in the backgroud.
Not to mention AI assistants are really good at helping you solve problems on Linux.
Yeah, I know, it's not the same as "knowing" a system when you just copy paste terminal output, but if it solves a problem and converts 1 more person to Linux from W - that's a win.
Agents work well on Windows for sysadmin stuff - PowerShell gives them an easy way to interact with Registry, event log, WMI and other facilities in a structured way.
Can you even disable all the ads on Windows 11?
Yes, and it's still fairly easy.
Edited with another method.
That's great, thank you.
What's frustrating about that is that Microsoft has also gone out of their way to make it difficult to access the [legacy] System Properties (sysdm.cpl), while not fully reimplementing all the features into the Settings app. Including this one.
They've only been working on this 10+ years...
What's more frustrating than that is the inability to have more than one control panel open at a time. Have your post of issues software open and want to change display resolution real quick? Sorry, you've lost your place in the list. Security settings are a separate app, but it's even worse because it requires elevation _every time_ before it can reload the list of issues. You thought this executable was already bypassing whatever protection, so you elevate to open the list of exceptions...then lose your place in the log and have to elevate yet again to find out the details...and open each list item in turn because the main list doesn't provide enough details to know know which item you were looking at and there's no detailed view. But you still can't cross-reference against your list of exceptions and forgot to take a screenshot, so you have to start over.
*.cpl, *.msc, etc are Windows sysadmins' (and developers') bread and butter; Microsoft will never get rid of them. I am betting (maybe hoping...?) that Windows 12 will undo the changes in Windows 8, 10, and 11 as bad experiments and return to what Windows has done best, which is discoverable GUI configuration. Let's see.
You're much more "glass half full" than me, but one can dream.
Also found in the GUI:
The default setting has been "Yes" for a very long time but most monitors over the years have simply used the default plug-and-play Windows monitor driver instead of installing their own. Triggering no additional downloads for the life of most computers. It just so happens that monitor manufacturers better adhered to the Microsoft guidelines for hardware compatibility earlier and more adequately than most devices. This might very well have been a reliability tactic since graphics drivers were still quite a moving-target shitshow, which in some ways is still ongoing.So people have mostly never gotten accustomed to monitor drivers having any consideration at all, while drivers for graphics themselves and other new hardware has often had some associated downloads that people have become familiar dealing with.
Looks like LG finally took this long-standing opportunity to do some deeper enshittification than previously imagined. Simply taking advantage of a domino effect that has been lurking for decades.
A couple other related gpedit options if you don't even want the drivers themselves to change after you have gotten them correctly installed:
Very helpful, thank you. But it does remind me of that Yzma quote in The Emperor's New Groove: "Why do we even have that lever?"
> Why do we even have that lever
For plug-and-play devices with multiple configuration knobs. It is nice to be able to click through a printer wizard to configure how one wants to print their documents. Likewise with an audio interface: loopback settings, codec, sampling rate, gain and volume of channels, etc. Or consider a USB CNC mill; configuring things like milling revolution rate, setting which bit is installed, what lubricant is used, etc. Or consider the Nvidia/AMD control panels for their GPUs; things like colour depth and space, resolution, scaling, anti-aliasing, vertical synch, power settings, etc.
Some of these settings are device- and even manufacturer-specific; one might argue these are more than a driver or the platform can or should provide. That being said, this stuff should go into a user-mode driver...
That LG have exploited this functionality to install adware is on them.
> It is nice to be able to click
You said click. This happens without clicking anything.
For audio interfaces, HDAudio lets you do most of this. What the extra software gives you instead is often some crappy DSP that increases latency and messes with sound quality.
For years, Dell's / Realtek's software had an unpaged memory leak somewhere. If you were using a screen reader (I guess they must interact with audio devices in some very specific way that Realtek hasn't accounted for), your system would eventually run out of RAM and BSOD. They didn't fix this until Microsoft and a few screen reader vendors intervened. "Don't buy Dell" was a standard recommendation in the blind community for years, which didn't help if you had a work PC with no local admin.
Oh definitely, it's more a question of why Microsoft allows any 'driver utility' to have internet access or do anything outside of just configuring the hardware.
> why Microsoft allows any 'driver utility' to have internet access
Firmware updates for devices are not a thing in your world?
It seems like windows update should handle distributing the verified new firmware file if it is also distributing the driver utility to avoid any issues like this post talks about.
That would be a good idea actually, but I'm not sure how viable that is within the current Windows Update instrumentation. Allowing local binaries to fetch random URLs through the Windows Update API is no different from them using the HTTP Service unless there's some kind of whitelisting/validation happening there. The alternative would be that Microsoft uses their own Windows Update cdn to host random firmware files that they're not able to verify themselves. Both cases sound like maintenance overhead for Microsoft without benefit to them.
There is no reason we need a badly coded vendor control panel to install firmware upgrades though. On Linux https://fwupd.org/ is a database for vendor firmware, and you use one shared open source took to install upgrades for all devices attached to your system.
[dead]
If there is a system where someone smashes through your wall to deliver you some food, and we ask "why do we even have this guy-smashes-through-wall system?", "So we can have dinner" does not answer that question.
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This is getting technical enough that you might as well install Linux if you figure out how to do this.
In other words, we all know that regular consumers will never find this and they’ll never understand that their LG software is spyware in the first place.
I would much rather follow these steps than spend days tinkering with a Linux distro
>regular consumers will never find this and they’ll never understand that their LG software is spyware in the first place.
Keep in mind the well-known quote from so many pages of Microsoft documentation over the decades, where the main useful function of a feature is the only one completely crippled in what's obviously got to be a complete engineering snafu:
"This is by design."
I had a mouse that would keep on installing its driver when plugged in, even with this setting off.
I remember Windows keeping a cache of autodownloaded drivers ("Driver Store") and reinstalling them when the device is plugged in, so the mouse bloatware kept on coming back.
Is this still the case?
You have to add keys under:
Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceInstall\Restrictions
The keys I have right now are all REG_SZ (strings), and in order of "1" through "5", are:
---
1. SWC\VEN_DELL&DEV_AWCC
2. SWC\VID_DELL&PID_AWCC
3. SWC\Alienware_Command_Center
4. SWC\AWCC
5. SWC\VID001&PID0001&AWCCWINUI3APP
---
Nothing short of this prevented "Alienware Command Center" (AWCC.exe) from pushing itself onto my machine because of my Alienware OLED monitor.
I should note it's possible to shoot yourself in the foot there; I had entries 6, 7, and 8 blocking SWC\Generic, SWD\GenericRaw, and SWD\Generic — and that prevented Audio Endpoints from being mounted...
You only need (5) (see the AWCCWINUI3APP thing there?). There is also a group policy equivalent to this:
Add the following two IDs: IMO this is especially heinous as Dell have registered the AWCC.exe software component as a hardware 'device' within the device tree that needs its own 'driver'. Methinks Microsoft need to tighten the noose on these annoying OEMs.Yuck.
And people say linux is too complicated for normal people because of terminal commands*
*which in reality no user is really forced to use, it just happens to be easier to share and copy/paste a set of commands than hundreds of clicks on a screen.
Even that isn't sufficient - I've been using this for years and every so often AWCC still manages to get through. The only 100% protection from it is to use Image File Execution Options to match on the installer name to prevent it from ever running.
> On home editions sans gpedit.msc:
I've managed to generally avoid running Windows (at home and at work) for a long time now, but if there was a situation where I needed to get a PC (at home?), is there a recommended least-sucky way of living with?
Are there editions or scripts or a setup workflow that would make it suck less?
Use autounattend.xml[1] to pre-configure an image before installation. This is what corporate sysadmins have done in the past three decades to administer Windows NT fleets. Use PowerShell and various admin modules to configure an online installation.
Then, to get a better version of Windows, use MAS[2].
[1]: https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/
[2]: https://massgrave.dev/
To be frank, no. In order to make windows not suck, you must invest a lot of time into knowing what to disable on the various SKUs, and in my opinion, it stopped being worth it around the time of windows vista (2006-7ish). I worked for Microsoft back then and ever since I left in 2007 i have thankfully been able to have a no-windows policy. I did briefly try going back last year for Unity dev but it was a mistake that made me want to quit computers entirely.
Use Pro, Home is needlessly limiting for a power user.
Don’t turn it on unless you need to print something.
Yes, Windows LTSC is an edition without as much crap.
Haven't used it lately (over 2 decades with linux as daily driver), so can't personally vouch for it.
The real workaround is to delete system32.
I had this shit with my alienware monitor. Doesn’t happen on Linux.
Superior workaround:
1. Reset machine 2. Tap the BIOS setup key (often DEL) during the time before it boots. 3. Insert intallation media for a decent OS 4. ...