4 ms·
Tipping point, for using ms products in general, was malware posing as an Asus driver /s. Fresh windows 10 install. Installed a bunch of drivers fresh off the
by 0xedd 5y ago
Tipping point, for using ms products in general, was malware posing as an Asus driver /s.
Fresh windows 10 install.
Installed a bunch of drivers fresh off the vendor's site.
Asus driver installation installed some GUI i didn't much care for, Armoury Crate. Well, no problem, right? One can extract the cab/inf files and let windows add the driver rather than use the vendor's executable.
Wrong.
Trying to uninstall the driver through the vendor's uninstaller - Error.
Add/Remove (probably points to the same location) - Error.
It ran a web service; Trying to end task it - Automatically restarted.
This went on for a long debugging session until I realized it's like fighting hackers for control over my own PC. An experience commonplace to windows. Sifting through dodgy forums yielded no results.
Thanks to AMD's professionalism, they added drivers for their latest video card gen to the Linux kernel well before their cards released. Which made my new gaming PC transition to an Arch based distro a no brainer. Didn't look back since.
For anyone interested, I'm using the Garuda distro for games successfully. All games that don't use intrusive garbage like Easy Anti Cheat work. It isn't an inplace replacement for ms and requires patience and tinkering. With the latest Proton 7 release, games work a lot better. Even Cyberpunk 2077 works out of the box with no tinkering.
Sifting through git issues, discussions, solutions and usually just a cli command away for Linux issues is worlds apart than the walled garbage dump that is ms.
If you're up for it, i suggest installing arch yourself as Garuda has its unjustified quirks.
I must add that regardless of anecdotal experiences with ms products, it is important to support the only competition by moving away from ms. Because of their monopolistic practices in tying up hardware to their own software such as TPM and Pluton. Security is great but not proprietary security that ties the hardware to a specific operating system. Something ms always strived for by thrusting their product as the default on any PC and laptop.
- formerly_proven 5y agofwiw you don't have to download drivers yourself, vendors are perfectly happy to distribute barely-uninstallable Adware using Windows Update. This is not limited to pre-built machines, either.
- chronogram 5y agoI hate that on my Latitude. After installing Windows 11 without internet I applied 3 different methods of disabling the automatic installation of drivers: group policy, control panel, and the registry. I rebooted to make double sure, and after connecting to the internet the first thing it does is install the Dell Maxxaudio crapware. You have to then go to the device manager to install the Microsoft audio drivers over it, then remove the crapware, but you’re not allowed to remove the app for it. Terribly annoying.
- dogben 5y agoThat Armoury Crate bullshit is embeded inside the UEFI ROM. It's called Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT). I can't distinguish it from malware. Trully disgusting.
- robotnikman 5y agoI didn't even know about the WPBT until I read this, that is truly horrifying. It's also probably a good attack vector for someone trying to install malware which persists on the machine even after reinstallation.