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Actually most Windows drivers are pretty small, in the same range as Linux drivers. The difference is that with Windows the company will also generally ship some sort of configuration utility (which 99% of the time is completely useless) which has all that GUI overhead and gives you megabytes of stuff. But the ACTUAL driver, the part that’s needed, is tiny.And a lot of times they do it an a very high handed arrogant manner. One time I was in a customers plant and needed to print something. He had good internet access so I went to the Epson website and downloaded the 65MB or whatever "driver" and installed it. So of course, without giving you the option to decline, it installs all of its crapware. So I just uninstall it, figuring only the "utility" will be deleted. Wrong. Deleted the driver as well! Couldn't find any way to install the driver without the program or delete the program without the driver. I eventually found a way, and the way I usually do this now is to install it on another machine where I don't care about the crapware (sometimes in a VM which will be reverted to pre-crapware as soon as I'm done), set up the printer as a network printer, then attach to that printer from the machine I really want to use, opting in Windows printer setup to import the driver to the local machine. This imports just the driver, leaving the crapware, and then you can delete the garbage off the other machine. Just pisses me off that due to their arrogance, you have to go to these lengths to run the part of software that they actually owe you. Have the same problem with a Brother all-in-one that I bought. It is networked (wifi even) and will store received faxes internally and if you install and run their crapware on a PC in the network, you can download and save the faxes and scans on that machine. Why the crapware? Why isn't the internal memory of the machine simply set up as a shared drive? I can see the machine on the network. Why not leverage existing Windows services and instead force me to load software that bogs down my computer and contains who knows what? It also makes me suspicious of the intent of the software if they went to all the trouble to write it when everything that it supposedly does could be done with Windows networking services you already have.

Most companies seem to operate under the assumption that their software is the only software you’re going to run on this machine. So it’s OK if they totally take over the machine.

Just look at multi-media software. They all want to have all the various media formats default to going through them, even the ones they can’t actually run well (I’ve lost track of how many media packages I’ve seen that can’t open Quicktime files but still want .mov to go to them), they all want these stupid little TSR in your startup to make it “faster” when they open files, they all operate from a theory that you have no other media software on your computer so of course you want them to do everything for you.