I don't think they are anymore. The vast majority of ordinary person computer/internet use has already moved to smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and other such devices. It seems nowadays many people don't even know the basics about how to use a desktop operating system.

MS owns Typescript and NPM and Azure and LinkedIn. I know you meant programming on Windows, but even if Windows disappears, many of us will owe our job to Microsoft.

> And then what, ever single gaming mouse/keyboard config is going to appear in the Windows UI dialog?

Actually, why not? The driver could declare a list/tree of extra configurable options, and windows could generate a configuration dialog for them. I think this is already is thing in Windows for NICs, I remember seeing TCP offload options when I go into properties for a NIC in the device manager.

You just need to make it a bit more accessible to non-tech users and with more modern control options such as colour wheels for RGB.

And the Linux software for these sort of devices (when such software exist) don't tend to be as bloated. Usually the driver just exposes some control files under /sys and someone else builds a GUI or such on top. But there is no reason you couldn't also expose a schema that describes what the options do to make a more generic GUI for those.

Configurable peripherals should store their configurations entirely on-board, and they should be configurable using a well-understood protocol. Users can then use either the vendor's application, a common third-party application, or the configuration interface native to their desktop environment to configure them. When they plug them into a new machine, they should just keep working without having to install any configuration software.

Many generations of Roccat peripherals were usable this way on Linux, thanks to the work of one generous volunteer who reverse-engineered them.

Companies like Logitech don't store their devices' configs in firmware in a way that "forces" you to run some additional shit to use all of their features (some features aren't implemented in software). It's a convenient excuse that allows them to push their spyware onto users, but it's totally unnecessary.

A vendor that was actually "user friendly" in the deep sense (opposite of "user hostile") would do this themselves; configuration would be upstream-first via libratbagd or whatever, and then they'd provide their own configuration interface as a value-add for a uniform cross-platform experience, or in areas where they thought they could provide a better UI than the design principles of KDE and GNOME, or so that they could have a uniform interface to refer to in their documentation.

Drivers should just make my stuff work. If I want to configure my hardware, I download the app from the manufacturer's website.

Yes! Extra apps suck.

Microsoft has a program to do static and dynamic analysis of drivers... not a sandbox, but better than nothing. Of course, wonky drivers plus wonky hardware can still do bad things (io-mmu can help, a bit).

The problems tend to be in the userspace software that's also installed with the driver. Sometimes there's also some pretty derpy stuff where the driver wants to talk to the userspace software but there's no validation/verification and that opens up a big hole.

There are people working on this problem honestly. The general solution 10 years ago was a micro kernel. Today, I’m not sure. The linux model is starting to look dated, with similar problems elsewhere. Modern hardware design looks less and less like classic textbook design, with all kinds of random chips having direct memory access to memory the cpu uses on some shared bus. Where even things like on board blue tooth chips can become attack vectors on the system.

There was a good keynote on the topic 5 years ago By Timothy Roscoe

https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/fri-ke...

The User-Mode Driver Framework is a thing. Most plug-in devices do not need (or have) a kernel-mode driver.