4 ms·

Right until the setting mysteriously disappears, or doesn't work. Not as rare as you may think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31823656 https://news.ycomb

Right until the setting mysteriously disappears, or doesn't work. Not as rare as you may think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31823656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31823656 And even then if they have the option, the entire process is designed to make the user feel as uncomfortable as possible while doing it. Disabling perfectly unrelated features (e.g. fast boot), going through Scary Boot Prompts, etc. are NOT acceptable requirements for booting a non-MS OS. It's not the first time a vendor disables the MS UEFI CA signature by default (e.g. Microsoft itself has done it on ARM _and_ x86 Surfaces).

oaiey 4y ago
I think Linux Desktop has to go a long way before some BIOS settings become "scary".
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  If you think so, it's been way too much since you used a Linux desktop.
  - kllrnohj 4y ago
    A regular Ubuntu update on my XPS 13, an officially supported combination, broke my wifi. Since then it has also somehow broke itself in some other fun way such that there are now package conflicts and it's unable to update itself anymore as a result. And that's ignoring all the general usability issues like the subpar battery life, the dreadfully terrible state of video playback, the touch screen constantly causing gnome to glitch internal state and get confused, etc... On my Debian desktop I had a webcam completely take out the USB stack. Like all ports just dead, had to yank the power to reboot. I also had a btrfs array just go read-only for seemingly no reason after restoring from standby, and it wouldn't tell me why. After a reboot all was suddenly fine. Also it took an awfully long time to get that machine working after having been powered off for 3 months. If you go too long without updating, it seems all the package migrations just bitrot and break. But yeah, year of Linux on the desktop. Any day now.
    - spookie 4y ago
      Debian is woefully antiquated at this point, and Ubuntu never was reliable. Ubuntu's default GNOME itself is a Frankenstein.
      - eadmund 4y ago
        It's really not true that Debian is 'woefully antiquated'; Debian 11 was released less than a year ago, in August 2021. Debian is stable; I use it for my desktop and all my servers. It is true that 'Ubuntu never was reliable,' at least in my experience; I honestly do not comprehend why so many folks base things on it.
        kllrnohj 4y ago
        > I honestly do not comprehend why so many folks base things on it. In this case it's literally the OS offered by Dell for the XPS 13. It's as official an option as you will ever see, so the fact that such a pairing is still a broken disaster is pretty significant. I could switch to a different distro, and I might. But distro hunting is exhausting. And it itself represents a never ending treadmill of churn. Like right now it seems like Fedora is a good option, and so are things like PopOS or Manjaro. But rewind the clock 5 to 10 years and some of those didn't even exist, or were not nearly as good of choices for "regular consumer usage." Whose to say I'm not just going to be stuck with yet another "oh, that distro used to be good but now it sucks, switch to foobar instead" in another few years? I'm more likely going to just switch it back to Windows if I'm going to get over the "back everything up & reinstall from scratch" hurdle. I at least know with Windows that I won't have to do a reinstall dance on this machine pretty much ever again. Having Linux for the better development options is nice, but with how good VMs are (and with things like WSL), running it bare metal kinda isn't all that necessary.
        ac29 4y ago
        > Debian 11 was released less than a year ago, in August 2021. Keep in mind though that it was branched and package versions frozen ~6 months before that. I like debian and use it on some things, but for a personal computer I always found it frustrating that the software was already half a year out of date on release day. Software getting released today wont be in Debian stable until 2023.
  - jjoonathan 4y ago
    If you think Linux Desktop is in decent shape, your hardware choices must line up with those of your platform maintainers. Good for you -- but your experience will be very far from universal. Some Ubuntu LTS highlights: Ubuntu 14: By default, Dell display backlights toggle on/off 30 times a second Ubuntu 16: By default, BIOS boots broken due to boot files landing in too high of a sector Ubuntu 18: By default, Solid State boot drives break because /dev/sda was hardcoded Ubuntu 20: By default, Bluetooth and fans broken. Never fixed. Sleep broken but fixed. Ubuntu 22: By default, NVidia graphics get 100% screen saturation after install. "Then don't use Ubuntu" Ubuntu isn't my daily driver. It isn't even a majority of my installs. I'm using it as a benchmark for conservative linux choices because smaller distros tend to be worse, not better. I know this because I daily drive a less popular distro, and I also distro hop for fun, and these all tend to be worse, not better. Besides, many hardware and software vendors target Ubuntu, and "works on Ubuntu but nowhere else" is a very common problem. Across the board, the Linus Tech Tips linux experience is the rule, not the exception. Many desktop linux users just have selective community-enforced amnesia. Look, I am super thankful for the maintainers. I have gotten so much more value from them then they have asked in payment, but Linux is nowhere near Windows in the "just works" department. That is to be expected, given the price, but the rhetoric has gotten out of line with reality. Desktop linux still has a lot of rough edges and new rough edges appear at a rate that is not converging to 0. "It works if you buy dedicated Linux hardware." Yes. This is how you make it work.
    - eikenberry 4y ago
      "It works if you buy dedicated Linux hardware." Yes. This is how you make it work. You buried the lede.
      - jjoonathan 4y ago
        Nope. I can understand how you might prefer that I had been writing about workarounds, but I was not writing about workarounds. I was writing about the incorrect and alienating rhetoric coming from the Linux community. Also, literally my first sentence: > your hardware choices
    - 4y ago
nicce 4y ago
> Disabling perfectly unrelated features (e.g. fast boot), going through Scary Boot Prompts, etc. are NOT acceptable requirements for booting a non-MS OS. There is Windows fast boot and UEFI fast boot, which are two diffent things. Sometimes vendors support only Windows fast boot, and at least then it is perfectly acceptable to force removal of that option. Also, for example the purpose of secure boot is to prevent modification and changes on boot options and underlying files, which makes it also to be fine to force disabling, until you set new keys for your new OS.
highwaylights 4y ago
I'm not saying it makes it OK, but Apple has gotten a pass for many years for having more barriers to booting another O/S than these steps.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  Not from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178408, not from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31165505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31165505 For the record, Google has also been doing the same for a lot of time now (Scary Boot Prompts if you try to run Linux on bare metal, but all is fine if you run containerized Linux on top of Google's OS). They don't get a free pass from me, either.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Apple Silicon maybe, but Intel Macs always made it very easy to boot other operating systems, you just had to hold down the option key while booting. T2 Macs had some complications with Linux, but that was due to a lack of support on the Linux side. My understanding is that recent kernels work fine.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    You could also set whichever operating system you wanted as default, then you didn't even need to hold Option.
petre 4y ago
Then return the laptop.

oaiey 4y ago

I think Linux Desktop has to go a long way before some BIOS settings become "scary".

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
If you think so, it's been way too much since you used a Linux desktop.
- kllrnohj 4y ago
  A regular Ubuntu update on my XPS 13, an officially supported combination, broke my wifi. Since then it has also somehow broke itself in some other fun way such that there are now package conflicts and it's unable to update itself anymore as a result. And that's ignoring all the general usability issues like the subpar battery life, the dreadfully terrible state of video playback, the touch screen constantly causing gnome to glitch internal state and get confused, etc... On my Debian desktop I had a webcam completely take out the USB stack. Like all ports just dead, had to yank the power to reboot. I also had a btrfs array just go read-only for seemingly no reason after restoring from standby, and it wouldn't tell me why. After a reboot all was suddenly fine. Also it took an awfully long time to get that machine working after having been powered off for 3 months. If you go too long without updating, it seems all the package migrations just bitrot and break. But yeah, year of Linux on the desktop. Any day now.
  - spookie 4y ago
    Debian is woefully antiquated at this point, and Ubuntu never was reliable. Ubuntu's default GNOME itself is a Frankenstein.
    - eadmund 4y ago
      It's really not true that Debian is 'woefully antiquated'; Debian 11 was released less than a year ago, in August 2021. Debian is stable; I use it for my desktop and all my servers. It is true that 'Ubuntu never was reliable,' at least in my experience; I honestly do not comprehend why so many folks base things on it.
      - kllrnohj 4y ago
        > I honestly do not comprehend why so many folks base things on it. In this case it's literally the OS offered by Dell for the XPS 13. It's as official an option as you will ever see, so the fact that such a pairing is still a broken disaster is pretty significant. I could switch to a different distro, and I might. But distro hunting is exhausting. And it itself represents a never ending treadmill of churn. Like right now it seems like Fedora is a good option, and so are things like PopOS or Manjaro. But rewind the clock 5 to 10 years and some of those didn't even exist, or were not nearly as good of choices for "regular consumer usage." Whose to say I'm not just going to be stuck with yet another "oh, that distro used to be good but now it sucks, switch to foobar instead" in another few years? I'm more likely going to just switch it back to Windows if I'm going to get over the "back everything up & reinstall from scratch" hurdle. I at least know with Windows that I won't have to do a reinstall dance on this machine pretty much ever again. Having Linux for the better development options is nice, but with how good VMs are (and with things like WSL), running it bare metal kinda isn't all that necessary.
      - ac29 4y ago
        > Debian 11 was released less than a year ago, in August 2021. Keep in mind though that it was branched and package versions frozen ~6 months before that. I like debian and use it on some things, but for a personal computer I always found it frustrating that the software was already half a year out of date on release day. Software getting released today wont be in Debian stable until 2023.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  If you think Linux Desktop is in decent shape, your hardware choices must line up with those of your platform maintainers. Good for you -- but your experience will be very far from universal. Some Ubuntu LTS highlights: Ubuntu 14: By default, Dell display backlights toggle on/off 30 times a second Ubuntu 16: By default, BIOS boots broken due to boot files landing in too high of a sector Ubuntu 18: By default, Solid State boot drives break because /dev/sda was hardcoded Ubuntu 20: By default, Bluetooth and fans broken. Never fixed. Sleep broken but fixed. Ubuntu 22: By default, NVidia graphics get 100% screen saturation after install. "Then don't use Ubuntu" Ubuntu isn't my daily driver. It isn't even a majority of my installs. I'm using it as a benchmark for conservative linux choices because smaller distros tend to be worse, not better. I know this because I daily drive a less popular distro, and I also distro hop for fun, and these all tend to be worse, not better. Besides, many hardware and software vendors target Ubuntu, and "works on Ubuntu but nowhere else" is a very common problem. Across the board, the Linus Tech Tips linux experience is the rule, not the exception. Many desktop linux users just have selective community-enforced amnesia. Look, I am super thankful for the maintainers. I have gotten so much more value from them then they have asked in payment, but Linux is nowhere near Windows in the "just works" department. That is to be expected, given the price, but the rhetoric has gotten out of line with reality. Desktop linux still has a lot of rough edges and new rough edges appear at a rate that is not converging to 0. "It works if you buy dedicated Linux hardware." Yes. This is how you make it work.
  - eikenberry 4y ago
    "It works if you buy dedicated Linux hardware." Yes. This is how you make it work. You buried the lede.
    - jjoonathan 4y ago
      Nope. I can understand how you might prefer that I had been writing about workarounds, but I was not writing about workarounds. I was writing about the incorrect and alienating rhetoric coming from the Linux community. Also, literally my first sentence: > your hardware choices
  - 4y ago

nicce 4y ago

> Disabling perfectly unrelated features (e.g. fast boot), going through Scary Boot Prompts, etc. are NOT acceptable requirements for booting a non-MS OS. There is Windows fast boot and UEFI fast boot, which are two diffent things. Sometimes vendors support only Windows fast boot, and at least then it is perfectly acceptable to force removal of that option. Also, for example the purpose of secure boot is to prevent modification and changes on boot options and underlying files, which makes it also to be fine to force disabling, until you set new keys for your new OS.

highwaylights 4y ago

I'm not saying it makes it OK, but Apple has gotten a pass for many years for having more barriers to booting another O/S than these steps.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
Not from me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31178408, not from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31165505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31165505 For the record, Google has also been doing the same for a lot of time now (Scary Boot Prompts if you try to run Linux on bare metal, but all is fine if you run containerized Linux on top of Google's OS). They don't get a free pass from me, either.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Apple Silicon maybe, but Intel Macs always made it very easy to boot other operating systems, you just had to hold down the option key while booting. T2 Macs had some complications with Linux, but that was due to a lack of support on the Linux side. My understanding is that recent kernels work fine.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  You could also set whichever operating system you wanted as default, then you didn't even need to hold Option.

petre 4y ago

Then return the laptop.