<story><title>HP installs system-slowing spyware on its PCs</title><url>https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/28/hp-quietly-installs-system-slowing-spyware-on-its-pcs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MichaelGG</author><text>Ubuntu has a bunch of telemetry stuff. And non-removable Amazon ad&amp;#x2F;apps that you&amp;#x27;ve got to copy and paste commands into the system prompt to fix.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s not pretend that if Linux ever got to the desktop in any meaningful way that these boxes wouldn&amp;#x27;t ship with everything including kernel modules to do &amp;quot;value added&amp;quot; nonsense.</text></item><item><author>dforrestwilson</author><text>Recently switched to Ubuntu for this reason. So far I&amp;#x27;ve been very impressed with the strides they&amp;#x27;ve made with the GUI and overall usability.</text></item><item><author>jasonkostempski</author><text>&amp;gt; All of the reports I’ve seen so far emphasize the point that HP (or Microsoft?) has installed this &amp;quot;telemetry&amp;quot; program without advising customers or requesting permission to install.&lt;p&gt;It is now well established that if you choose to run Windows you&amp;#x27;re going to be playing this game of cat and mouse until the end of time. You simply are not in full control of the OS.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ekianjo</author><text>&amp;gt;  Ubuntu has a bunch of telemetry stuff. And non-removable Amazon ad&amp;#x2F;apps that you&amp;#x27;ve got to copy and paste commands into the system prompt to fix.&lt;p&gt;This is blatantly false. All Amazon stuff in Ubuntu is now opt-in only.</text></comment>
<story><title>HP installs system-slowing spyware on its PCs</title><url>https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/28/hp-quietly-installs-system-slowing-spyware-on-its-pcs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>MichaelGG</author><text>Ubuntu has a bunch of telemetry stuff. And non-removable Amazon ad&amp;#x2F;apps that you&amp;#x27;ve got to copy and paste commands into the system prompt to fix.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s not pretend that if Linux ever got to the desktop in any meaningful way that these boxes wouldn&amp;#x27;t ship with everything including kernel modules to do &amp;quot;value added&amp;quot; nonsense.</text></item><item><author>dforrestwilson</author><text>Recently switched to Ubuntu for this reason. So far I&amp;#x27;ve been very impressed with the strides they&amp;#x27;ve made with the GUI and overall usability.</text></item><item><author>jasonkostempski</author><text>&amp;gt; All of the reports I’ve seen so far emphasize the point that HP (or Microsoft?) has installed this &amp;quot;telemetry&amp;quot; program without advising customers or requesting permission to install.&lt;p&gt;It is now well established that if you choose to run Windows you&amp;#x27;re going to be playing this game of cat and mouse until the end of time. You simply are not in full control of the OS.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BeefySwain</author><text>Can I recompile Windows without any telemetry? Can I build my own Windows OS from scratch or install a pre-built one from a person or organization I trust?&lt;p&gt;You are correct, that pre-built machines are almost never trustworthy. That is not really important though, in that the very nature of GPLed Linux makes a huge difference to the user in terms of control of their machine.&lt;p&gt;This false-equivalence FUD is not compelling.</text></comment>