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Comment by reificator | Hacker News Reader

> The best thing about Windows now is that once you've registered your machine via their online tool, reregistering after a clean install is the click of a button.

> They have a windows 10 builder tool that downloads the ISO and burns it to USB or DVD. So there's not much stopping a customer from registering and then doing a crapware-free clean install. The downside (besides needing the skill and time to do it) is you'll lose any baked in freeware but the line between freeware, trialware and crapware is so thin now I'm not sure that's a concern.

And the best thing about your computer is that it's so complicated that a determined manufacturer like Lenovo can hide their crapware installers in, say, the UEFI. Which will then automatically install them on a fresh OS install.

You make the mistake of thinking that you own your computer. You do not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10039870

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I found this out with my ASUS motherboard on my desktop. There's a UEFI option which bootstraps an automatic installation of their own software called Armory Crate which then invokes itself to install a load of "junk".

My last 3 laptops were Asus, HP and Acer, none of them had that UEFI crap.

My last 3 desktops were the ones I assembled myself from components, desktop motherboard manufacturers don't do that.

I think your example is a rare exception, not a rule.

Desktop motherboard manufacturers definitely do it, and they have FAQs of how to disable it: https://www.asus.com/support/FAQ/1043788/

Very interesting. I guess I was lucky with Gigabyte last time.

Does anyone maintain a list of crapware-infested motherboards customers should avoid?

Have you tried Linux?

1. The post I was replying to was about how Windows was great.

2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.

> 1. The post I was replying to was about how Windows was great.

Ah sorry, I got lost in the the thread hierarchy.

> 2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.

Yes, I do. I guess other than CPU microcode and other such stuffs that I can't reasonably get around.

Please don't misunderstand my post starting "the best thing about Windows..." as an overall endorsement of Windows. I didn't mean it to be read that way. I was just saying it's more convenient to have a clean install, although as you pointed out UEFI shenanigans can counteract that, so thank you for that.

>2. Do you actually run linux/bsd as your only desktop operating system, with no binary blob drivers? Because otherwise, you still don't own your computer.

I ran openbsd for decades, bought every release dvd, a few t-shirts and did my best to own my hardware. The only reason I don't run it now is their networking stack can't sustain gigabit speeds on the firewall hardware I use. Freebsd can't either, but it gets much closer. More than double the performance, actually. At least for me, it'll have to do.

I'm not the person you replied to, but to answer your second question myself, yes, I do. I have four desktop PCs (one for each of my family members including myself), a netbook, and a custom built router in my house. All run Linux except the router, which runs a flavor of BSD. The Linux computers use AMD graphics with the open source AMDGPU driver. No Windows PCs[0], no blob drivers. Works quite well in practice.

[0]: My work laptop runs Windows 10, because they issued it, administer it, and own it. I'm required to use their software baseline for working.

I'm not a free software zelot or anything, but I do this on my desktop and its not too difficult. As far as I can tell they're aren't any binary blob drivers to install anyway and the standard linux drivers work great.

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