To boot another OS it is already necessary to make BIOS changes to boot from a device other than the primary hard disk, so I really don't see it as being any more tedious. The reason Linux distributions are looking at enabling Secure Boot has nothing to do with being too lazy to google then switch something in BIOS it is for dual-booting and to gain whatever advantage Secure Boot can give under Linux (however dubious this is).
As for MS hardware partners removing the option to turn off Secure Boot -- they can but they won't be able to use the "Certified Windows 8 Compatible" stickers if they do as MS themselves mandated that Secure Boot can be turned off.
I also think it highly unlikely that CERN, various government agencies and numerous universities around the world will just switch to Windows 8 so that manufacturers can stop producing motherboards which support any OS apart from Windows.
That said, in your own words "all major OS vendors are already looking into booting with Secure Boot enabled" so even if Secure Boot were permanently on you could boot Red Hat, Fedora or Ubuntu already and others will follow. So you'll still be able to choose a non-Microsoft OS.
Microsoft's market share is declining and their power is declining -- it's not time to sing "ding dong the witch is dead" yet but it's certainly time to stop the FUD.

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"BIOS" is dead since years. There is UEFI since 2011 and entering the "Setup" without booting Windows 8 is not possible due to "fast boot". If there is even a setup, because proprietary Windows-based firmware setup software is so much easier with UEFI.

That is the current situation, not some future prospect.

MS currently mandates this, because they get burned by competetion law otherwise. But once MS has lost its market leader position (due to the fact, that PC sales are going down), they will demand the complete opposite, let's say for the "Certified Windows 9 Compatible" sticker.

I'm not talking about expensive motherboards for rack servers, I'm talking about mass market retail PCs, especially notebooks. On the client almost nobody cares about running something different than Windows.

Yeah, a choice between Red Hat and Ubuntu, isn't that great? What do you like? Systemd + Wayland or Upstart + Mir?

I think, Windows will decline and take its platform (the PC) with it. But MS itself has a powerful future as patent troll.

Both as LQ member and as LQ moderator I agree wholeheartedly with this.

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It's not a great choice but it's a choice and one that you said before we wouldn't have.
Have you not read about the Linux Foundation looking into Secure Boot also?
I've already proven that your "MS only" argument is FUD so I'll stop here.

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as for me, it equals to a no choice.

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I really don't want to start a debate about this but I don't think Systemd is bad enough that it couldn't be got used to and lived with day-to-day and Wayland is likely to be coming to most distributions eventually since the X11
developers admit that X11 isn't really fit to go any further. I'll admit that I wouldn't want either tomorrow but in 5 to 10 years when they're mature and understood I don't see them being very bad things.
On the other hand, touch interfaces like Metro (or whatever MS want to call it) will always be irritating to those of us who don't use touch devices and proprietary software will always be a PITA.

Same here. If it comes to that, I'll quit computers.

My daily job mainly consists in replacing virus-infested, slowed-down-by-mere-use or otherwise near unusable Windows installations by clean & crisp Slackware installations. You wouldn't believe how much technological nonsense folks accept to get shoved down their throats and live with before even beginning to realize something's terribly wrong with their work tools.

Back in the late seventies my dad worked as a developer for the Video 2000 standard. We had one of these machines at home. The technology was incredible, excellent image quality, and you could put up to 16 hours of film on one tape without too much quality loss. The concurrent technologies were Betamax and Sony's VHS. The latter finally imposed itself as a "standard", which means everybody ended up using it, though it was far inferior compared to Video 2000. The image was blurry and got worse with time, and recording time was limited. The technically superior ancestor fell into oblivion after a few years.

So just because everybody's using something doesn't quite make it a "standard".

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I never said it did.
My point was that a Linux spoiled by something one doesn't like is better than a proprietary OS which only has a few things to like about it.
There will be changes in Linux some of which I will hate, some of which I will like. No doubt, we'll disagree on some of those. That's not a reason to leave Linux, in my opinion, at least.

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Most people are already buying in to Windows anyway so secure boot won't make too much of a difference really. The people mostly worrying about it are the ones already using something else, ie Slackware.

If I was a small manufacturer building PCs secure boot could really open up a market for me. All those millions of Slackware* users all over the world wanting vanilla computers that they can no longer get in the retail park...could be a real business opportunity for me.

And the secondhand market will be flooded with i7 quad-cores at bargain prices.


*ok 'Linux' users then :-)

Incorrect. Fast boot is completely optional as a feature. It is enabled by default, but it can be turned off.

As far as UEFI is concerned, it was the motherboard manufacturer's decision to use Intel's UEFI because UEFI added more flexibility to the system where the BIOS lacked, not Microsoft's. Microsoft's only decision as to not support GPT boot under BIOS.

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This thread has gotten a little sidetracked, maybe?

Red Hat developers (and openSuse ones) take an active part in developing the shim, a signed bootloader that can boot any distribution, so this discussion point is mood: https://github.com/mjg59/shim

They tried to add support for loading kernel modules wrapped into the EXE (PE) format to the upstream Linux kernel, because MS only signs their own file format. I don't think, you understand the concept of Secure Boot correctly.

I am pretty sure that I understand how it works. You can see how the signing process works on slide 19 here: http://www.slideshare.net/ennael/sec...s-une-solution