On Linux you'd be using the community-maintained drivers[0], so I assume this wouldn't be a problem (correct me if I'm wrong).
But as far as I can tell, there's not equivalent Open Wacom drivers for Windows. People with more Windows knowledge than me: any thoughts on why? Is it just that someone using Windows probably doesn't care about Open drivers, so the demand isn't there? Or is there something about Windows that makes substituting drivers harder?
Wacom doesn't provide their own Linux drivers, but looking at the state of drivers around GPUs, printers, I vaguely suspect that somebody in Linux would be working on Open alternatives even if they did. I'm trying to think off the top of my head what Windows-compatible hardware has 3rd-party driver options. Maybe some printers?
Now, if only someone could make Wacom drivers that make the Wacom touch functionality interface better with Photoshop and friends, rather than just handing keyboard shortcuts to them. Somehow, that's the best Wacom has managed to do, which makes those features effectively unusable in the very apps those tablets are most commonly used...
Open source drivers are rare on Windows because manufacturers almost always ship proprietary drivers that are good enough, and Windows users clearly have no issues running closed-source software.
Proprietary drivers on Linux are often crap, if they even exist at all.
Linux purposely makes proprietary drivers crap. The kernel offers no stable binary interface so drivers become broken every single time linux updates unless the drivers get compiled as part of the kernel. This forces manufacturers to either decide that they will open source the drivers, not have any at all or put in the work to keep them up to date every release.
It seems like forcing the all or nothing choice made a lot of OEMs open source their drivers or provide none which lead to the community making them.
There is also the little matter of Windows (since 7 I think?) requiring kernel drivers to be code signed, unless you want to run your system with a permanent "Development mode" text overlay, not to mention the arcane procedure required to activate that in the first place. (You can't add another cert to the trusted set, either.)
So that puts a little damper on the whole "open source" thing. Of course it is also not effective at all, Stuxnet was famously signed by Realtek.
Windows users should push for FOSS drivers as well also when the proprietary ones run perfectly. Privacy and security issues aside, being forced to depend on a closed driver means that the manufacturer can make the product obsolete just by stopping support on newer Windows versions, therefore turning the product essentially into trash, thus forcing the user to buy a new one.
>Proprietary drivers on Linux are often crap, if they even exist at all.
Not so with Nvidia GPUs. The open drivers are awful; the proprietary drivers are good.
(But IS the case with AMD GPUs, to the point where the proprietary driver seems to perform worse[0] and everyone pretends it doesn't even exist, which is upside down unintuitive coming from A.) Windows and B.) Nvidia.)
Ever since the Windows multi-platform tablet push windows has had built-in drivers for touch & pen support. For the purpose of drawing, these drivers are actively antagonistic, as they have weird touch macros that make fine detail virtually impossible. And as they are built-in to windows, these drivers are also a pain to override by third-party drivers.
Add that to the complications that already arise from interfacing a 3D (touch sensitivity) precision input device with a computer and you end up with poor official driver support, and even worse community driver support
Clearly this isn't a trivial or very fun job (last time I used them, the Linux drivers were buggy as hell). Who would have the motivation to do it on Windows, where you have a driver that works and users have little expectation of privacy to begin with?
The Linux drivers for Wacom tablets have never been buggy in the past decade in a half I’ve used them. Other parts of the stack (Xinput, libinput, GUI libraries) have been, but the actual driver provides good data to userspace.
Even then, to me the drivers on Linux have been perpetually less buggy. On Windows I found myself needing to restart the usermode service and restart applications frequently, especially if the USB connection was unreliable. The Linux driver did not have similar issues.
>users have little expectation of privacy to begin with?
The cynical side of me wonders how long it will be before prosecutors argue, with a straight face, that using evidence obtained from mass surveillance against people using Microsoft Windows is okay because Microsoft collects a massive amount of data so nobody should expect their files and activities to remain private; that there is or should be no expectation of privacy on such a system.
And then how long until warrant applications come in with supporting evidence that the subject of the warrant uses Linux and therefore their increased desire for privacy is prima facia evidence that they're doing something illegal.
Yes, it doesn't apply to Linux. Also on Linux libinput and synaptics drivers support wacom tablets, so you don't necessarily need to even install linuxwacom (in my config I do "xinput set-prop ..." for both cases to setup pressure curve).
... if you install and configure popularity-contest, which includes an explicit opt-in process [0] and it still doesn't track usage, merely installation.
One of the first things Debian does is ask consent about this, and the FAQs are clearly published: https://popcon.debian.org/FAQ. You can't say the same about most things.
The sad bit is that (some reasonable) telemetric data is really, really useful for software engineering. If you have a large enough program, of course it'll have way more bugs than you could ever fix. Crash tracking and usage analytics is how you make a data driven decision on what to fix, and what to ignore. This enables a data driven approach to software quality that's a huge improvement.
Having worked on projects that did and did not have telemetrics, working without them feels absurd - it seems like you're just randomly fixing the side mirror on a car without any idea what's actually broken on it (independently of your overall testing posture).
Vendors tracking excessive information without proper disclosure destroy this information source for those developers that try to collect reasonable information (with consent, disclosure, in context, etc).
Really great article.
But I wonder, why the author did not cover if/what the driver publishes, If I do:
- open "Wacom Desktop Center"
- Top right (next to "Login") is "More" (click!)
- "Data Privacy Settings" (click!)
- "Participate In Wacom Experience Program" => on => off!
My setting was "On" - and I swear: whenever a program/website/installer asks I go "No thankx". So it must be dark UI patterns with evil defaults that this super-hidden thing was "on" for me. Shame on you, Wacom!
When you install it, the first window they show you is a Terms of service agreement that has "Agree" "Disagree" buttons - except, it's not a Terms of Service agreement. It's an agreement to turn the program on.
So you have to click "Disagree" and continue the install to have it on.
Or you could vote with your wallet and buy a Huion instead. They are just as good, if not better. And about half the price. It's all made in China any way.
FWIW that isn’t a unique identifier for the author, it’s for Wacom’s GA account. I didn’t see any meaningful identifier being sent. Of course the set of most opened apps and your IP are probably enough to identify you.
That said, yep, it seems lame they don’t disclose this tracking. I can understand why they’d want to know what apps their device pairs most often with, but tracking all app opens seems aggressive, but maybe it’s the only way to identify what app is open when the device is used.
Tracking the currently open application software side is perfectly within scope for a drawing tablet - they often have buttons that can be bound to keyboard shortcuts, etc. It makes sense that it should know when you're focused on Photoshop vs Google Chrome.
But why are they sending this data to a server? My best guess is that this helps them focus on what software people are using. This allows them access to the popularity of graphic applications. They get to see what percentage of users use say Photoshop vs [Other program here] - so they know where to prioritize integrations and testing.
But I'm not sure how much "integrations" or work with third parties Wacom does - the drawing tablets are following an api standard after all. But maybe wacom does work directly with application devs, I don't really know.
I doubt they're doing this to try to track individual users - even if there are ways to do it. That said I really wish they approached this with a more friendly "Would you like to enable some basic Telemetry to improve Wacom products - Yes, No" instead of a very unfriendly user agreement where they try to force it.
IMO the more simple explanation is they want this data to sell to data aggregators, who can in turn enrich the profile they have on you. There's a similar thing going on with smart TVs, right?
It doesn't really matter what their reasons are. Having the data is a liability. The author explained one scenario where these things can go wrong. Another is if they're hacked. Or if they're purchased by a larger unethical company. Or if they accidentally keep the data in an open database on an Amazon cloud service. Or a million other scenarios.
Heya - I could swear that wasn't there when I originally wrote the comment, but obviously it is there. Thanks for pointing that out. With that said, it doesn't change the substance of my comment too much - as I pointed out one can get a pretty solid unique identifier many ways, not limited to what I said above, you could even call out the presence of a permanently identifying header that Chrome gives some users[0].
Heya, replied to another comment that brought up the same thing, sorry about that - here's what I wrote there:
Heya - I could swear that wasn't there when I originally wrote the comment, but obviously it is there. Thanks for pointing that out. With that said, it doesn't change the substance of my comment too much - as I pointed out one can get a pretty solid unique identifier many ways, not limited to what I said above, you could even call out the presence of a permanently identifying header that Chrome gives some users[0].
This is just one of many reasons to use StevenBlack's Hosts [1] list to block this type of behavior. While it doesn't currently block link.wacom.com, it would have prevented the subsequent requests google analytics. It works even better when paired with a PiHole [2] to protect all devices on the network.
I mean I put Pihole on all my networks but this is at best a solution to “nice malware” that doesn’t bother to hardcode addresses or perform lookups via an attacker controlled DNS server.
You can catch slightly more aggressive malware by forcing all DNS traffic to your server at the network level but you’re now playing the role of malicious network operator. I would whitelist this to only devices you own.
I don't think anyone would make the argument that a PiHole is a replacement for following best practices in terms of computer and network security. I'm just pointing out that a PiHole can block google analytics and other common violators of privacy. Its not a security tool and isn't advertised as such.
Sadly, some of these list don't currently include google-analytics.com since some sites would otherwise break as a result. So when using one of these hosts files it's often a good idea to double check whether they include Google's domains first.
(Also sad to say that GA is so big that a lot of websites/app rely on it)
Wow, that's weird. I don't remember ever seeing one site like that. Can you point one out? I mean, GA has been blocked at my places since 2015, and I don't remember anything ever was broken, on phone or desktop.
I don't know enough about webdev, but why is google analytics request sent by the client? Wouldn't it be easier for the webhost to send a request to google "this IP with this browser connected to me requesting this content", making it impossible to block on the client side?
Microsoft has started resetting hosts files which is really annoying with Defender, can't seem to disable it either. Annoying when deving on a local server!
Hosts files are literally the devil. They break so much shit. Hostnames sometimes change behavior (like an ad server that starts hosting a redirect script for legitimate clicks), kids who are "good with computers" set them up on relatives computers over the holidays unmaintained, malware that uses them to block antivirus updates, etc.
If you want to block ads, fine. Use a content aware proxy or browser extension.
Bravo for a really well written article. I'm interested in this kind of thing but not familiar with techniques & tools used, so it was really nice that the author included lots of detail, reasons for doing things, etc.
I work on UX, coming from an engineering background. It means that everyday I work close to product management and engineering.
The trend over the last 10 years is to collect tons of data to improve the product. Some PMs and UXrs believe that they’ll get a magic insight from the data, and the skeptics do it anyways because is another data point to have. For engineering, services like GA are cheap and easy to integrate.
Nobody has a bad intention. But, we are distracted by the next product release to see the long term consequences for the society.
The reality is that some data is useful, but most of it is BS. To measure adoption and engagement you can do a pilot and then deactivate data collection. Big app errors are reported soon after a release, and you don’t need to continue collecting that for a long time.
To improve the UX you can do research with less data points, and smaller groups. The irony: I wish to have data to prove it, my hypothesis is based on my experience. I got more actionable insights from qualitative research, self-reported metrics, or quantitative data focused in certain aspects (instead of collecting all just in case). Some times having nice reports based on tons of data is more useful as an argument for corporate politics rather than to improve the product, but users doesn’t need to pay the consequences of your company stupidity (I’m looking at you MS telemetry ;-) )
There is a simple thing that we can do to change this trend. Ask yourself: What is the goal of collecting the data? What product hypothesis you want to prove? Can you get insights from a small group?
If you don’t know.... hold on your data collection desires.
For those cases the app can collect the exceptions only (as many apps and OS do).
I worked on a desktop product with this type of data collection. Usually what happens is that after a new release you may see new errors coming up, and then they start to repeat. The data collection becomes a burden, new reports of the same error type doesn’t give you more information.
It’s a good opportunity for a good UX, e.g point the user to the relevant support info to solve the problem.
For support cases you may be able to ask for diagnostics on demand. The app can collect it internally without sharing and send part of it when an exception occurs and the user accepts to send it.
I wonder what the comfortable medium between privacy and letting developers get feedback about how well their code works is. It seems to me like Wacom just wants to know if their drivers work, so they can focus engineering efforts around fixing the issues that are affecting their users. "Oh hey, the new beta of Photoshop breaks our drivers!" They don't make a "cloud product" and they have an obligation to make their hardware work with any software the user might want to use, so they are kind of painted into a weird corner here. If they collect data to drive their engineering, they're spyware. If they collect no data, they're a bug-ridden disaster area whose product you would never buy.
I am guessing that the answer will be "they should test everything in house and tell users to complain via email when shit is broken"... but we all know that synthetic QA is never going to be as good as "ground truth", and that 99% of users will just silently be unhappy. So I wonder what the privacy balance is here.
I understand the need for developers to know more about the hardware and software running on their client machines. For example, I believe information like the hardware survey from Valve [1] are very valuable for the whole industry.
But there's a some kind of an etiquette you need to follow, if a company wishes to collect data:
- Be straightforward. Say what information you are collecting, at what time and what for.
- Tell me in what way this information will be stored and how will it be anonymized.
- Will the data be stored forever? And is there a way for me to request the data or it's deletion?
- Don't collect data per default. Make it opt-in.
- Publicize the data in a suitable way. It may be useful to others.
Wacom simply ignored all of that human decency. How can you ever trust this company again?
> I wonder what the comfortable medium between privacy and letting developers get feedback about how well their code works is.
I consider the nut of the problem to be informed consent. If you have user's informed consent to get the feedback, then there is no problem. If you don't, then the whole operation is unacceptable.
And no, mentioning it in the privacy policy or terms of use don't count as "informed consent".
This would be a real challenge for some companies. Having a clear privacy policy creates a hard dependency between it and the code. And developers are notorious for not even being able to keep comments updated along with their code changes.
It's not impossible at all, just in the current state of the industry there's a good reason we have vague agreements (also including good old-fashioned laziness, of course). It'd probably need to be developed ground up as an API with side effects, so when the code is compiled it spits out some details about how it's used.
Thing that I know happens, from personal experience: you can put a giant modal alert, and write in blinking, all caps, 60pt bright-red font that you will do something unless the user presses a button, then draw a bright red arrow to the button. Users will still complain that they weren’t informed.
Users are lazy and dumb, and the most ideological users are often the laziest and/or the dumbest, because they have an agenda. They will go out of their way not to give you the benefit of the doubt (”why was the font not 80pt? Clearly, you’re trying to hide something from users on high resolution screens!”)
The way Steam handles the occasional hardware survey requests, which are purely opt-in, seems appropriate here. “Please select which applications you use your Wacom with” with a permanent opt-out checkbox would be quite acceptable. (Steam knows what games we play but not beyond that; Wacom must ask us to specify which apps we ‘play’ since the OS can’t be more specific.)
FWIW, as a customer of Wacom's products they very much do not view themselves as
> [having] an obligation to make their hardware work with any software the user might want to use.
They update drivers for 4 or 5 years then tell you to buy a new product if you expect it to work with current-gen software. Despite the fact that none of their tablets have had a substantial new feature in 20 years beyond the wireless connection kit, somehow a driver for a "Intuos Pro 4" cannot be used with a functionally-identical "Intuos Pro 3".
To me the comfortable medium is 100% privacy. 0% feedback. There is no middle ground because feedback and privacy should not be conflated. Users already own the device and owe no data to their vendor.
I've started turning off analytics everywhere. I turn off reporting on Firefox, Atom, everywhere. No crash report. Nothing if I can untick the box. Windows Firewall Control or LittleSnitch for all the outbound traffic as well. I don't let most windows services talk to the Internet unless it's updates or Windows Defender.
Some stuff is going to get through, but it should just be because you missed it. I'm sorry FOSS people; everyone is collecting way too much and I don't want to give Mozilla my data either. No, not even crash reports.
I have a Wacom tablet. The drivers don’t install on macOS any more. There doesn’t seem to be any technical reason for this. It’s a USB device (“essentially a mouse”) and it worked fine for several major versions. Maybe it was a 32/64 issue.
You’d think if keeping users happy was their primary goal, they might start by keeping their existing USB drivers compiled for the current macOS.
They don’t need me to email them to tell them it’s broken under current macOS. They’re the ones who told me!
Readit News
But as far as I can tell, there's not equivalent Open Wacom drivers for Windows. People with more Windows knowledge than me: any thoughts on why? Is it just that someone using Windows probably doesn't care about Open drivers, so the demand isn't there? Or is there something about Windows that makes substituting drivers harder?
Wacom doesn't provide their own Linux drivers, but looking at the state of drivers around GPUs, printers, I vaguely suspect that somebody in Linux would be working on Open alternatives even if they did. I'm trying to think off the top of my head what Windows-compatible hardware has 3rd-party driver options. Maybe some printers?
[0]: https://linuxwacom.github.io/
These were made to reduce input latency to increase performance in a rhythm game called "osu!"
Never thought of using a tablet for it, but I am so going to try that!
Proprietary drivers on Linux are often crap, if they even exist at all.
It seems like forcing the all or nothing choice made a lot of OEMs open source their drivers or provide none which lead to the community making them.
So that puts a little damper on the whole "open source" thing. Of course it is also not effective at all, Stuxnet was famously signed by Realtek.
Not so with Nvidia GPUs. The open drivers are awful; the proprietary drivers are good.
(But IS the case with AMD GPUs, to the point where the proprietary driver seems to perform worse[0] and everyone pretends it doesn't even exist, which is upside down unintuitive coming from A.) Windows and B.) Nvidia.)
0: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-a...
Add that to the complications that already arise from interfacing a 3D (touch sensitivity) precision input device with a computer and you end up with poor official driver support, and even worse community driver support
Even then, to me the drivers on Linux have been perpetually less buggy. On Windows I found myself needing to restart the usermode service and restart applications frequently, especially if the USB connection was unreliable. The Linux driver did not have similar issues.
For example, you’ll never have to follow this guide on Linux: https://www.deviantart.com/kiiroikat/art/How-to-Fix-Wacom-Dr...
I don’t recall having issues with the Mac drivers either.
The cynical side of me wonders how long it will be before prosecutors argue, with a straight face, that using evidence obtained from mass surveillance against people using Microsoft Windows is okay because Microsoft collects a massive amount of data so nobody should expect their files and activities to remain private; that there is or should be no expectation of privacy on such a system.
And then how long until warrant applications come in with supporting evidence that the subject of the warrant uses Linux and therefore their increased desire for privacy is prima facia evidence that they're doing something illegal.
It is certainly on Wacom for not providing better drivers to Linux, but neither is the FOSS solution a complete one.
Deleted Comment
This, perhaps not, but Linux distros track app usage, too: https://popcon.debian.org/
[0] http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/con...
Deleted Comment
Having worked on projects that did and did not have telemetrics, working without them feels absurd - it seems like you're just randomly fixing the side mirror on a car without any idea what's actually broken on it (independently of your overall testing posture).
Vendors tracking excessive information without proper disclosure destroy this information source for those developers that try to collect reasonable information (with consent, disclosure, in context, etc).
- open "Wacom Desktop Center"
- Top right (next to "Login") is "More" (click!)
- "Data Privacy Settings" (click!)
- "Participate In Wacom Experience Program" => on => off!
My setting was "On" - and I swear: whenever a program/website/installer asks I go "No thankx". So it must be dark UI patterns with evil defaults that this super-hidden thing was "on" for me. Shame on you, Wacom!
So you have to click "Disagree" and continue the install to have it on.
I guess I'll have to send a company-wide emailer along with the above instructions. Thank you very much for your writeup.
That said, yep, it seems lame they don’t disclose this tracking. I can understand why they’d want to know what apps their device pairs most often with, but tracking all app opens seems aggressive, but maybe it’s the only way to identify what app is open when the device is used.
(I work for an analytics company)
But why are they sending this data to a server? My best guess is that this helps them focus on what software people are using. This allows them access to the popularity of graphic applications. They get to see what percentage of users use say Photoshop vs [Other program here] - so they know where to prioritize integrations and testing.
But I'm not sure how much "integrations" or work with third parties Wacom does - the drawing tablets are following an api standard after all. But maybe wacom does work directly with application devs, I don't really know.
I doubt they're doing this to try to track individual users - even if there are ways to do it. That said I really wish they approached this with a more friendly "Would you like to enable some basic Telemetry to improve Wacom products - Yes, No" instead of a very unfriendly user agreement where they try to force it.
Pretty much every site you visit puts PII in the title, which the browser dutifully includes in it's title.
GSuite leaks my email address:
Desktop apps are pretty much no different.Outlook leaks my email address, and subject lines of emails or meeting information:
Visual Studio leaks filenames, repository information: Pretty sure most office suite and Adobe apps will do something similar.[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106
Heya - I could swear that wasn't there when I originally wrote the comment, but obviously it is there. Thanks for pointing that out. With that said, it doesn't change the substance of my comment too much - as I pointed out one can get a pretty solid unique identifier many ways, not limited to what I said above, you could even call out the presence of a permanently identifying header that Chrome gives some users[0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106
Dead Comment
[1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
[2] https://pi-hole.net/
You can catch slightly more aggressive malware by forcing all DNS traffic to your server at the network level but you’re now playing the role of malicious network operator. I would whitelist this to only devices you own.
(Also sad to say that GA is so big that a lot of websites/app rely on it)
Wow, that's weird. I don't remember ever seeing one site like that. Can you point one out? I mean, GA has been blocked at my places since 2015, and I don't remember anything ever was broken, on phone or desktop.
In some VMs / computers, I'd like to whitelist Internet domains instead of blacklisting, for security reasons.
Edit: Seems PiHole supports whitelisting: "Manage White And Black Lists" https://pi-hole.net/
Hosts files are literally the devil. They break so much shit. Hostnames sometimes change behavior (like an ad server that starts hosting a redirect script for legitimate clicks), kids who are "good with computers" set them up on relatives computers over the holidays unmaintained, malware that uses them to block antivirus updates, etc.
If you want to block ads, fine. Use a content aware proxy or browser extension.
https://www.kali.org/downloads/
(Also make sure to check out Maltego, Metasploit Framework and Armitage.)
The trend over the last 10 years is to collect tons of data to improve the product. Some PMs and UXrs believe that they’ll get a magic insight from the data, and the skeptics do it anyways because is another data point to have. For engineering, services like GA are cheap and easy to integrate.
Nobody has a bad intention. But, we are distracted by the next product release to see the long term consequences for the society.
The reality is that some data is useful, but most of it is BS. To measure adoption and engagement you can do a pilot and then deactivate data collection. Big app errors are reported soon after a release, and you don’t need to continue collecting that for a long time.
To improve the UX you can do research with less data points, and smaller groups. The irony: I wish to have data to prove it, my hypothesis is based on my experience. I got more actionable insights from qualitative research, self-reported metrics, or quantitative data focused in certain aspects (instead of collecting all just in case). Some times having nice reports based on tons of data is more useful as an argument for corporate politics rather than to improve the product, but users doesn’t need to pay the consequences of your company stupidity (I’m looking at you MS telemetry ;-) )
There is a simple thing that we can do to change this trend. Ask yourself: What is the goal of collecting the data? What product hypothesis you want to prove? Can you get insights from a small group? If you don’t know.... hold on your data collection desires.
I worked on a desktop product with this type of data collection. Usually what happens is that after a new release you may see new errors coming up, and then they start to repeat. The data collection becomes a burden, new reports of the same error type doesn’t give you more information.
It’s a good opportunity for a good UX, e.g point the user to the relevant support info to solve the problem.
For support cases you may be able to ask for diagnostics on demand. The app can collect it internally without sharing and send part of it when an exception occurs and the user accepts to send it.
I am guessing that the answer will be "they should test everything in house and tell users to complain via email when shit is broken"... but we all know that synthetic QA is never going to be as good as "ground truth", and that 99% of users will just silently be unhappy. So I wonder what the privacy balance is here.
But there's a some kind of an etiquette you need to follow, if a company wishes to collect data:
- Be straightforward. Say what information you are collecting, at what time and what for.
- Tell me in what way this information will be stored and how will it be anonymized.
- Will the data be stored forever? And is there a way for me to request the data or it's deletion?
- Don't collect data per default. Make it opt-in.
- Publicize the data in a suitable way. It may be useful to others.
Wacom simply ignored all of that human decency. How can you ever trust this company again?
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
I consider the nut of the problem to be informed consent. If you have user's informed consent to get the feedback, then there is no problem. If you don't, then the whole operation is unacceptable.
And no, mentioning it in the privacy policy or terms of use don't count as "informed consent".
It's not impossible at all, just in the current state of the industry there's a good reason we have vague agreements (also including good old-fashioned laziness, of course). It'd probably need to be developed ground up as an API with side effects, so when the code is compiled it spits out some details about how it's used.
Users are lazy and dumb, and the most ideological users are often the laziest and/or the dumbest, because they have an agenda. They will go out of their way not to give you the benefit of the doubt (”why was the font not 80pt? Clearly, you’re trying to hide something from users on high resolution screens!”)
It never ends.
> [having] an obligation to make their hardware work with any software the user might want to use.
They update drivers for 4 or 5 years then tell you to buy a new product if you expect it to work with current-gen software. Despite the fact that none of their tablets have had a substantial new feature in 20 years beyond the wireless connection kit, somehow a driver for a "Intuos Pro 4" cannot be used with a functionally-identical "Intuos Pro 3".
Some stuff is going to get through, but it should just be because you missed it. I'm sorry FOSS people; everyone is collecting way too much and I don't want to give Mozilla my data either. No, not even crash reports.
You’d think if keeping users happy was their primary goal, they might start by keeping their existing USB drivers compiled for the current macOS.
They don’t need me to email them to tell them it’s broken under current macOS. They’re the ones who told me!