alt Hacker News> Why do we even have that lever
For plug-and-play devices with multiple configuration knobs. It is nice to be able to click through a printer wizard to configure how one wants to print their documents. Likewise with an audio interface: loopback settings, codec, sampling rate, gain and volume of channels, etc. Or consider a USB CNC mill; configuring things like milling revolution rate, setting which bit is installed, what lubricant is used, etc. Or consider the Nvidia/AMD control panels for their GPUs; things like colour depth and space, resolution, scaling, anti-aliasing, vertical synch, power settings, etc.
Some of these settings are device- and even manufacturer-specific; one might argue these are more than a driver or the platform can or should provide. That being said, this stuff should go into a user-mode driver...
That LG have exploited this functionality to install adware is on them.
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For audio interfaces, HDAudio lets you do most of this. What the extra software gives you instead is often some crappy DSP that increases latency and messes with sound quality.
For years, Dell's / Realtek's software had an unpaged memory leak somewhere. If you were using a screen reader (I guess they must interact with audio devices in some very specific way that Realtek hasn't accounted for), your system would eventually run out of RAM and BSOD. They didn't fix this until Microsoft and a few screen reader vendors intervened. "Don't buy Dell" was a standard recommendation in the blind community for years, which didn't help if you had a work PC with no local admin.
Oh definitely, it's more a question of why Microsoft allows any 'driver utility' to have internet access or do anything outside of just configuring the hardware.
If there is a system where someone smashes through your wall to deliver you some food, and we ask "why do we even have this guy-smashes-through-wall system?", "So we can have dinner" does not answer that question.
> It is nice to be able to click
You said click. This happens without clicking anything.