That's quite limiting. TBH Ubuntu sucks now. And I still not convinced that they will try to take away
the ability for third party signers to boot.

Fair enough, but seeing that Windows systems on the desktop are one of most targetted, I don't really find it surprising that they at least try to come up with solutions to those problems.

The point is that support costs and bad reviews would increase dramatically when the average user suddenly is limited by his own system and has to learn security before being able to use them. I guess that is also the reason why most of the distros that aim at the average user (Ubuntu, Mint, ...) also don't implement advanced security features. I totally agree with you that this is not a good thing per se, but I can see where they (both Microsoft and the distro maintainers) are coming from.
Of course sales are their number one priority, after all Microsoft is a not a non-profit organization, they are a commercial company and their leaders, like in most large companies, have to please their shareholders.

It doesn't though, as I mentioned in previous posts. Having a signed bootloader and keys on the device is nothing new -- it's just they haven't really been on general-purpose computers up until recently. I completely agree that M$ will use anything to gain market share but I don't agree that that is the primary reaaon for this. The likes of "secure boot" have been a long time coming to mainstream personal computers.
Juat as an aside, also, it's not just Microsoft who don't apply full security to default installs -- lots of Linux distro's do all sorts of things which are considered bad practice on default installs. Heck, Canonical have been known to capture root equivalent passwords in plaintext during the install...

I'll take a reasonable amount of convenience of security any day. The average computer user just doesn't need the same level as a business and government security.

I am the same, I agree. I was only posting regarding the suggestion that M$ were somehow alone in doing it.

Yeah, and that's why it's totally impossible to trust their official corporate blah blah.

True, but Microsoft isn't the problem here. A problem only occurs when an OEM decides to leave out the option to disable Secure Boot.

Once they are allowed to, they will. MS knows this.

They were allowed all the time. Nothing at all was preventing them from not offering this option, they only needed to implement it if they wanted to participate in the Windows 8 Logo program. Participating in this program is not necessary, even when you want to deliver machines with Windows 8 pre-installed, and there are many OEMs that didn't participate.

Alternatives to using linux if vendors lock linux users out:

• System76
• Zareason
• Raspberry PIs
• Odroid-C1

The last two are not very powerful options, but it's better than nothing.

There is also the Libreboot option from Gluglug:
http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/product/l...ation-service/

At the moment this is only for a limited range of (non-EFI) Thinkpads but hopefully they can expand this in the future.

Good to know...thx

Nice concept but only a limited model range and EU only.

If you've got the skills (which I believe smeezekitty has), you can install Libreboot yourself. Limited options, yes - but I bought a refurbished X200 off an eBay dealer for £83 and it's running Slackware64 14.1 perfectly.

http://libreboot.org/docs/install/index.html

It will be interesting to see whether any OEMs decide to prevent the disabling of "secure boot" and, if they do, why. I can't see it being cheaper to do so as UEFI and BIOS are surely just third-party standard software so removing routines may even cost more?
I do worry that M$ may revert to their previous style of business though and pay OEMs to lock down "secure boot" via some kind of "loyalty discount" or other plausibly deniable means. Hopefully though they've learned from their previous criminal conduct that they will have some kind of sanctions imposed for that kind of behaviour even if they are relatively mild.