 There's a lot of reasons why people start using GNU Linux and free software in general. Obviously the freedom and flexibility that is afforded to you by Libre Software is a huge bonus. But I still don't think that that's the reason that most people, especially less tech savvy people who don't realize how evil proprietary software is choose to use Libre Software. But one of the bad aspects of proprietary operating systems like Windows that I think less tech savvy people can get behind hating is software bloat. Much like the American obesity rates over the past century, bloat within Windows has gotten out of control. And it was actually this software bloat that led to my first stint with using Linux many, many years ago. When I was a wee lad around 12 years old I received an Acer Aspire 3680 for my birthday. That bad boy came with a single core, 1.6 gigahertz processor, 512 megs of RAM and the Windows Vista operating system pre-installed to it. And like a lot of other computers at the time the Aero graphics and the widgets and other bits of bloat that Microsoft shoehorned into the Vista OS slowed it down significantly especially when I was using my laptop for important 12 year old work like playing RuneScape. So I did what I could to improve the speed of Vista and learned a lot about the OS in the process, disabling the fancy graphics and stuff like that I didn't need. I switched to Firefox and then eventually to different RuneScape clients that ran without a browser. But my poor little Acer still couldn't keep up with some of the busier places in the RuneScape world like the Grand Exchange or worse yet the wilderness just north of Edgeville. And by this time I had even upgraded my PC to two gigabytes of RAM, but that Celeron processor was the bottleneck and I disabled everything I could within Windows. It even got to the point that I disabled Explorer.exe which is like the background process that's responsible for the start menu and stuff like that. And I just used the command prompt to launch applications which made me feel like a bit of a hacker man and it also led to me wrecking some havoc on the computers in the middle school's computer lab and eventually the IT department just disabling the command prompt across all the computers in the schools because me and my friends were being hooligans. And then one day I learned about Ubuntu. I downloaded it, I created a bootable USB and I was thrilled by the fact that I could use it as a live OS from the USB prior to installing. I never experienced something like this with the different versions of Windows XP and 7 that I am pirated from LimeWire. And looking back through the infosec knowledge that I have now, it was probably one of the few operating systems you know Ubuntu that I ever installed that probably didn't have root kits in it because for you younger folks who never used LimeWire, it's a lot like getting a box of assorted chocolates except most of the chocolates are gonna contain weird porn and crazy viruses that will completely wipe out your family computer. Now, I still had to use Windows to play some other games, you know, back in the day because Windows gaming or Linux gaming rather was far less developed 16 years ago. But I guess RuneScape with it being a Java application, it really made no difference at all whether you played it on Linux or whether you played it on Windows, all that mattered was freeing up more of the CPU and RAM from the OS for the game which was a lot easier to do with Ubuntu than Linux or Ubuntu than Windows because it came with a lot less blow. And now looking back, Windows Vista and 7 weren't even that bad. They weren't that bloated compared to Windows 10 and Windows 11. I mean, don't get me wrong, they're still not as good as Ubuntu but at least Windows back then didn't install additional programs like additional bloat to your computer without your consent. So this is the latest bit of horror that I've seen with Windows 10 and Windows 11 in the news. Apparently a new update, a bug in a new update is causing Windows to install HP printer bloat on people's computers just out of the blue and it's regardless of whether or not you have an HP printer or really whether you've got any printer at all, okay? Maybe you don't use a printer and it doesn't matter. Windows thinks you have an HP printer or at least they think you should get one. So here is the situation according to windowslatest.com. So the HP smart application is automatically just getting installed on Windows 11 and Windows 10 and it's getting installed via the Microsoft Store, okay? And this is also including the latest update. I think there's the latest update for Windows 11 23 H2. So if your installation is affected you're going to notice this inside of your start menu, okay this little app called HP smart. Now they say that this application HP smart can be safely removed and it's not going to cause any problems on your system, which is all well and good. But the point still remains that Microsoft should never, ever, ever be forcing this kind of crap on people in the first place. And I also have a feeling that this might violate some of those new tech laws that the EU passed, those laws that are supposed to be giving people a little bit more freedom over their devices. If Windows had to allow people to uninstall Microsoft Edge and some of the other bloat that ships with the OS that for the longest time they couldn't let you install or uninstall, just my gut feeling tells me that this is going to be in violation of that in some way and that Microsoft might also be getting some fines from the EU because of this. Now to make matters worse, this HP smart app isn't just popping up on people's computers randomly and taking up space, but it's actually renaming printers that your Windows PC has access to, to HP M101 or some other model in HP's laser jet range. And so at this point, I think it's pretty fair to say that Windows, this bug that they have, has installed malware on people's PCs because put yourself in the shoes of someone like a grandma or just someone else who's not very tech savvy and they only use the computer and the printer to do stuff like make holiday cards or print up bulletins for church. Well, if you go renaming that grandma's printer, she's gonna probably get confused, the church bulletins won't get printed and that's effectively a denial of service, a denial of a church service, which maybe's a little bit worse. Clearly, the best method to keep our grandma's computers and printers working effectively is to uninstall the malware that is Windows. It's malware and also a system for delivering more malware kind of like, you know, rootkits and whatnot. Just throw on a JustWorks Linux distro on their PC and maybe give them a nice Windows theme. You know, you can even give them a Windows XP theme. I mean, that's what I use on Arch here for the Window Manager, something that looks familiar to them and then let them finally do their computing with some actual freedom. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to like it and share it to hack the algorithm and check out my merch on base.win. 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