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.
Finally you can rein in the data collection and remove much of the microsoft freeware by using https://old.reddit.com/r/tronscript.
> 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.
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.
Does anyone maintain a list of crapware-infested motherboards customers should avoid?
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.
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.
>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.
[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.
Would I miss the updated drivers from Dell or other vendor?
There's some controversy (linked elsewhere in this thread) that those basic drivers are allowed by Microsoft to advertise their "full bloat" versions in notifications and launch time popups. The flipside to that controversy is that if you want the "full bloat" versions (such as the Geforce Experience if you are a game player), that makes it easy to acquire them as it is general a case of go through the notifications and popups on first launch, from what I've seen.
You can turn off the advertising ("Suggestions") and as long as the bundled "crapware" remains UWP sandboxed, it is a far cry from most of what the OEMs have been accused of.
Quality control on Microsofts driver database is really poor.
I'm seriously considering a switch to iOS at this point.
Admittedly it has a rubbish camera but I don't really take pictures so that's fine with me. For a £200 phone it has been just as good for my needs as every flagship nexus/pixel I've owned asside from the crap camera.
It's got to the point that it'll be out of support soon and I'm having a hard time finding a decent replacement for anything near a comparable price.
Maybe it's time to try out LineageOS?
That makes me sad to hear. One of my favorite things about the old Nokia (especially the Lumia series) was that they cared about having good camera hardware. The low end stuff was better than most of the other brands I tried, and if you got something with PureView...
One of the greatest losses from the retail Microsoft Store shutdown was the loss of Microsoft's "Signature Edition" PC program. They only sold in their Stores PCs with clean Windows installs, which they labeled "Signature Edition". Many of the OEMS participated (Dell, Lenovo, others), and generally when you could directly compare Signature Edition models to their regular direct from the OEM counterparts (which the companies model naming/numbering schemes often intentionally tried to make hard to do) it was often about a $50 premium over the "full of junk installed" PC (showing about how much all that bloatware is valuable to the OEMs if it subsidizes machines by about $50).
For a brief period it even looked like other retailers might adopt Signature Edition sales and you could even walk into a Staples or a Best Buy and find sales people that could source Signature Edition machines, for the people that still liked to try to deal shop between multiple retail stores.
I miss being able to give the advice "buy whatever computer you want from Microsoft Store, or if you go to Staples/Best Buy keep asking sales people until you meet the person that knows what Signature Edition means and you generally won't have any problems with the machine".
Now the advice is back to "buy a Surface from Microsoft or be prepared to spend a couple hours using the Windows Fresh Start tool from Microsoft first".