HN doesn't like your tone and you are being down voted. But in general you are correct, Linux and bsd users are less affected by such shenanigans.
Short personal story:
I had a win10 machine were HP kept installing some "analytics" service. This happened even on a clean windows install so I guess they used the same delivery mechanism LG is using here. After having read the HP ToS (where they basically gave themselves unlimited rights to monitor anything I did on that machine), I decided to wipe the disk and install Linux.
But I guess it is just a matter of time before EU or US make spywares mandatory on Linux too. Chat control and age verification seems to be the first step towards that.
I don't know about the BSDs but in Linux the reason is that a volunteer (in principle it could be a paid employee, I guess maybe it is for RHEL etc?) decides what gets installed
It is absolutely possible that when you plug in an LG display it installs and runs software on your Linux system†, just that rather than "Somebody at LG who earned a bonus" the decision maker was Sara in Portugal who fat fingered a change when trying to make a Python script for a PCI digital TV receiver work properly on 32-bit.
It does feel more like an amusing mistake in that case whereas even if LG tells us it's a mistake we know it was to earn $$$.
† Obviously YMMV but such "plug and play" features are commonplace because they're useful
I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. There is no mechanism in standard Linux distributions to automatically download software from a vendor when you plug a device (apart from firmware updates through fwupd, but those are curated).
Now, when I first ran Linux in the mid-1990s, this was true. "Plug-and-play" is just peaking over the horizon. Other systems have had it for years (the Amigans for example) but for the PC it's pretty new.
But today a whole lot of mechanism is spun up when the kernel realises something new was added. A netlink socket talks to a udev daemon, in userspace and that daemon, being ordinary userspace software can do whatever it wants including of course run a bunch of arbitrary shell scripts, which can in turn do whatever they want. So yes of course they could download arbitrary software, or delete all your files with a Z in their name.
> from a vendor
Where the Adware comes from is of no consequence to the end user. "Um actually, the file came from Microsoft's servers" is irrelevant.
[Speaking more specifically of fwupd, which is ultimately fed by hardware vendors directly]
> but those are curated
I'm sure Microsoft considers that they are curating their system too. We both just think (I assume you're not here to defend Microsoft) their curation sucks.
I want to be sure we're pointing at the right thing here. The problem isn't that your Windows PC can end up running software because a device was plugged in, that's actually convenient and a benefit to many people and that works in Linux. The problem is what was delivered.
HN doesn't like your tone and you are being down voted. But in general you are correct, Linux and bsd users are less affected by such shenanigans.
Short personal story:
I had a win10 machine were HP kept installing some "analytics" service. This happened even on a clean windows install so I guess they used the same delivery mechanism LG is using here. After having read the HP ToS (where they basically gave themselves unlimited rights to monitor anything I did on that machine), I decided to wipe the disk and install Linux.
But I guess it is just a matter of time before EU or US make spywares mandatory on Linux too. Chat control and age verification seems to be the first step towards that.
But in general you are correct, Linux and bsd users are less affected by such shenanigans.
Mac users too (at least for now).
I don't know about the BSDs but in Linux the reason is that a volunteer (in principle it could be a paid employee, I guess maybe it is for RHEL etc?) decides what gets installed
It is absolutely possible that when you plug in an LG display it installs and runs software on your Linux system†, just that rather than "Somebody at LG who earned a bonus" the decision maker was Sara in Portugal who fat fingered a change when trying to make a Python script for a PCI digital TV receiver work properly on 32-bit.
It does feel more like an amusing mistake in that case whereas even if LG tells us it's a mistake we know it was to earn $$$.
† Obviously YMMV but such "plug and play" features are commonplace because they're useful
I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. There is no mechanism in standard Linux distributions to automatically download software from a vendor when you plug a device (apart from firmware updates through fwupd, but those are curated).
So perhaps you could elaborate?
> no mechanism in standard Linux distributions
Now, when I first ran Linux in the mid-1990s, this was true. "Plug-and-play" is just peaking over the horizon. Other systems have had it for years (the Amigans for example) but for the PC it's pretty new.
But today a whole lot of mechanism is spun up when the kernel realises something new was added. A netlink socket talks to a udev daemon, in userspace and that daemon, being ordinary userspace software can do whatever it wants including of course run a bunch of arbitrary shell scripts, which can in turn do whatever they want. So yes of course they could download arbitrary software, or delete all your files with a Z in their name.
> from a vendor
Where the Adware comes from is of no consequence to the end user. "Um actually, the file came from Microsoft's servers" is irrelevant.
[Speaking more specifically of fwupd, which is ultimately fed by hardware vendors directly]
> but those are curated
I'm sure Microsoft considers that they are curating their system too. We both just think (I assume you're not here to defend Microsoft) their curation sucks.
I want to be sure we're pointing at the right thing here. The problem isn't that your Windows PC can end up running software because a device was plugged in, that's actually convenient and a benefit to many people and that works in Linux. The problem is what was delivered.
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Not only Linux/BSD, but MacOS. Not that Apple isn't annoying either, but it tends to avoid the windows bloatware stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fbt1fVfi-g