Intel has been pinging me a few times a day for months about a driver update for my Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. As both work fine, I’ve ignored it. But then you hit that final nag, and you say:
I know how shitty this was going to be; this is why I chose to delay; I can’t take this anymore.
I could have fucking installed KDE Neon on a new partition table in the time this took. And, of course, a goddamned fucking driver update needs a EULA for each, and would I like to install it in the same directory as before (which clues you in than you’re not, in fact, installing a driver update if the EULA didn’t), and would I like to use the same settings as before, and now I need to confirm that “yes, just leave everything else the fuck alone and update my driver.”
And then close out with another button. Interestingly, the Wi-Fi updater UI is XP/Vista era, while BT is Win95. You seriously can’t do better than this in 2026?
And, of course, in both cases, I was interrupted by Windows itself to confirm I wanted to let Intel access Intel drivers.
I like having control over my machines, but there’s got to be a better way.
And if they tucked rights to a firstborn into the EULA update, joke’s on them: I’m fixed.
My hot take is I couldn’t be happier to see that. It means they didn’t try to replace a known working solution with some post-modern vibe-coded garbage. Not everything needs to be an Electron app, not everything needs to be styled with Tailwind. Sometimes less is more.