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We need something that dictates how commercial software can be distributed, installed, and what it can automate and do without your consent. Software increasin

We need something that dictates how commercial software can be distributed, installed, and what it can automate and do without your consent. Software increasingly adds itself to "run at startup" automatically. Nobody needs to have a bunch of startup user interface apps. It is completely unnecessary and has little purpose other than data collection. A work VPN I have to use requires a startup background service. I'm not even using it, it does not need the service to operate at boot. Steam service does this too, as do many other applications. Microsoft will remove my group policy that disables their useless and performance destroying antivirus. The software that is one of the big 10 in causes for why windows laptops are trash. FYI AV's are humorously easy to bypass. Adblockers and browser settings are more effective. On MacOS I can just disable these easily. On windows, I need auto runs to ensure, and either the application breaks (steam) or it'll turn itself back on. "A plea for windows' demise". Preferably the rest of Microsoft with it.

tpmoney 3y ago
Thinking about this recently and I’m wondering if part of this is that OS developers have stopped providing common services as part of the OS and part of it is that many apps aren’t coded to the native services the OS provides in the first place. Most apps that throw a startup process in the background are probably aiming for (in part) an auto update service. Why don’t OSes provide a service that an app can register a URL to check for updates at? Yes the App Store does this for apps installed there, but outside the App Store there’s no way to do that and to my knowledge nothing like that exists for Linux or windows (barring the few things that seem to be available in windows updates). The other part of course would be even if the OSes did provide this, who would write code for it? Maybe electron would have a function to register with the os native endpoint but until/unless they did, would any electron devs code for it or would they keep writing their own services?

tpmoney 3y ago

Thinking about this recently and I’m wondering if part of this is that OS developers have stopped providing common services as part of the OS and part of it is that many apps aren’t coded to the native services the OS provides in the first place. Most apps that throw a startup process in the background are probably aiming for (in part) an auto update service. Why don’t OSes provide a service that an app can register a URL to check for updates at? Yes the App Store does this for apps installed there, but outside the App Store there’s no way to do that and to my knowledge nothing like that exists for Linux or windows (barring the few things that seem to be available in windows updates). The other part of course would be even if the OSes did provide this, who would write code for it? Maybe electron would have a function to register with the os native endpoint but until/unless they did, would any electron devs code for it or would they keep writing their own services?