I find it hard to understand how could steveklabnik's comment be seen as warring.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

As for software installation, that is true for software packaged by your distro (for Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora and others, that only includes open-source software by default), and similarly, a lot of Windows software is now available from MS Store. But even on Linux, you'll need to download software manually (e.g., Chrome is not available in default Ubuntu repos, same for Discord, Slack, Teams, VS Code, Dropbox, Spotify and other common software). Even worse, less known dev tools are quite often installed with `curl ... | sh` or equivalent, which is a strictly worse alternative to installers on Windows from a security perspective.

Then, there's the question of phishing, infected torrents, fake movie pirating sites,... Currently, most malware from these sources will target Windows (various .mp4.exe files, Excel macros,...). If Windows users migrated to Linux, malware would adapt and start targeting Linux.

Desktop Linux is currently protected by being a low value target – it has low market share, and most of its users are power users, which makes them harder to trick. The opposite is true for server and embedded Linux, and it's a frequent malware target as a result.

No mainstream desktop OS tries very hard to sandbox drivers. Some drivers on both Windows and Linux (not very familiar with Mac) can be implemented as userspace drivers, as long as the performance hit is acceptable, but for many devices (e.g., graphics drivers), you need a kernel driver to get reasonable performance.

Therefore, if your OS supports loading 3rd party binary drivers (Windows do, Linux technically does as well, but tries to make them hard to use in practice), it cannot really refuse to load kernel drivers and only allow userspace ones without breaking a lot of machines.

Even if you have a userspace driver, the device may still get DMA access to RAM. IOMMU is a thing, but due to backwards compatibility, the driver chooses whether to enable IOMMU protection for the specific device on Windows.

If you're willing to write your own microkernel and bootstrap its driver ecosystem from scratch, your claims would be reasonable. With current desktop OS architecture, not really.

As for the accompanying software, there is a good explanation in another comment of all the valid use cases it has (printer dialogs, audio interface configuration,...). LG abusing that to show ads is primarily LG's problem.

I'm not surprised that the driver got approved, especially if the previous versions already had some user UI and this update "just" added the ads. What I would hope now is for MS to either pull the updated driver or ask LG to roll the change back themselves, possibly under the thread of pulling their drivers altogether (iirc they done that with other companies in the past).

Imo, the only thing Microsoft can meaningfully do here from their side is threaten LG with pulling all their drivers if they keep doing this.

The rest of your comment is just as ignorant.

Not really. AutoRun ran whatever was on the USB drive, with no oversight. This installs a driver from a company that's supposed to be reputable enough to get their driver signed by MS and pass validation. LG breached that trust here.

This is basically the same as downloading a program, running it and when it downloads garbage on your computer, complaining that Windows are dumb for allowing a program to download garbage.