Or they could bundle a basic driver or police the driver they're curating while allowing people to download and install drivers directly from the vendor website with no policing, no signature checks, etc.
Distributing malware is negligent or malicious, yes. Not stopping users from seeking out their own malware is neither. Nothing stops you from running malware on Linux. The curated repos are simply good enough that there's not much reason to go looking elsewhere.
Well yeah, when you spend a significant segment of your corporate life being both negligent and an evil monopolist, people tend to assume the worst. Don't like it? Behave better.
There are more than the two bad choices for behavior here.
It's not "no matter what they do" it's really that everything they do is wrong and there really are much better alternatives than the choices they continue to make.
50% is a bit much. People do expect their hardware to just work. That means installing drivers and the like. And the act here is so egregious that I can't imagine being an LG engineer and living with the shame of being so incredibly despicable.
I'm disappointed with Microsoft, I'm incensed at LG.
I don't know that Microsoft is without significant blame here. They provided a mechanism for LG to do this without the necessary checks. They could just as easily make part of the WHQL process and related agreements state pretty clearly that such behaviour is forbidden and will result in anything from financial penalties to driver decertification.
If anything, as shitty as LG's behaviour is, Microsoft gave them the tools to eke out a little more money at the expense of the consumer, and a company like LG is not likely to leave that money on the table out of the goodness of their hearts. As the scorpion told the frog - "It's my character".
What part of "software needed to control a peripheral" could POSSIBLY be defined as: "software that shows you ads, and/or uploads private data to vendor without even asking for consent"?
Easy fix: freeze their developer signing accounts like they did with VeraCrypt and WireGuard, demand that they remove spyware to regain access to sign their future updates.
The difference is you can remove the LG adware without any serious downsides. Removing auto-installing drivers would have serious downsides for the average person (meaning not cyberspace experts on forums such as this).
> No, this is LG making a choice to abuse an OS feature in order to shove ads down people's throats and spy on them.
Meh, give a company something they can feasibly abuse for money, and they'll probably do that. I'm not sure that this is practically feasible on Mac or Linux; Macs enable fairly constrained but powerful userspace drivers that generally need approval, and I've never seen a piece of hardware automatically download anything that can run in the background, but that could be an anecdotal experience. Maybe printers would be the exception.
The tradeoff is that even software like Zoom doesn't completely work by default