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Linux Has Not Won, Microsoft is as Dangerous as Ever, Fie on Secure Boot

• lttlrck 14y ago
  What an awful rant. Who said Linux has won the desktop? So now it's got a bit harder to remove the Windows 8 license you just voluntarily paid for. Oh dear. If you are going to whine about Secure Boot please write an article based on its technical merits.
  • xutopia 14y ago
    Not everything has to be technical. There are huge powers in politics and this author explains nicely how MS is playing the game. If anything more people should know about this.
    • vital 14y ago
      Also more people should know about this - http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.de...
      • mcantelon 14y ago
        Going by the article's TLDR, this is a bundle of pretty flimsy arguments. The first argument "no stability" is pretty funny to those of us who use Linux as a desktop OS every day.
        • brendonjohn 14y ago
          the TLDR is worthy of a self-facepalm.. >> I guess, under 10,000 hours of testing I would of thought that the regression of Microsoft is inferior to the diversity of people using Linux daily. Another benefit to a rolling release cycle I suppose
      • jlgreco 14y ago
        Despite Linux not being ready for "The Desktop", it is certainly ready for my desktop. That is the one that matters to users of Linux. Their desktop, not a hypothetical grandmother desktop which has been branded "The".
  • 4ad 14y ago
    > a bit harder to remove the Windows 8 license you just voluntarily paid for It's not voluntary as long as the option of not buying doesn't exist. It's coercion.
  • bct 14y ago
    Nobody thinks that Linux has won the desktop, but we did think that it had won the right to exist. For a while it looked like Microsoft had put its anticompetitive practices aside.
  • cooldeal 14y ago
    It somehow feels as if for some folks like the author, bringing down Microsoft is more of a priority than adding to user freedom via Linux or BSD or whatever. See Ubuntu Bug #1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 - Microsoft has a majority market share So if you believe the graph that someone else posted today, Microsoft has already lost and that means Ubuntu/Linux has won... or something. http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker-2012-internet-trends-year-end-update-2012-12#-24 http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meeker-2012-internet-tre... From the article: >Every purchase of a Windows license is an attack on Linux. Linux has not won, and Microsoft is as dangerous as ever What if people buy an iPad instead of a Windows PC? Is that an "attack" on Linux? How about total lack of developer freedom in iOS or even charging for in app purchases or banning linking to a website for buying things? Or even if the user buys a Mac instead, do you think Apple would be better at enhancing user freedom that MS was? How about the Apple tax on all hardware that you need to buy to get Mac compatibility if it gets a monopoly?
  • jlgreco 14y ago
    For me it had won. Linux had reached the point where I could go up to any computer I wished, fire up Linux, and have it not even occur to me that something wouldn't work. Not "have it work most of the time", but have it work "enough of the time that I no longer pondered the possibility that it wouldn't." My last two laptop purchases in the last 3 years were done with no research into Linux compatibility; neither time did I regret the purchase. Now I have a concern again, and that doesn't feel nice.
    • Shorel 14y ago
      > For me it had won. You are not the desktop market, just a single user.
• vital 14y ago
  I stopped reading Carla Schroder's articles a few years ago. Her ideas about Linux border on religious fanaticism.
• tomrod 14y ago
  I'm surprised Microsoft's actions regarding boot loading are legal. They're clearly economically inefficient by forcing an association of platform and preventing multihoming.
  • kvb 14y ago
    Does MSFT's approach make it harder to write rootkits? Doesn't that have value to their users? Is there a plausible alternative that protects their users to the same degree? If not, then even if it makes it harder for users to install Linux as a side effect (or primary effect, if you're feeling cynical), I don't understand why this behavior would be illegal.
    • jerf 14y ago
      Yes, yes, and yes respectively. Secure booting isn't necessarily a bad thing, but users must be in full control over their keys. Only the user can decide who the user trusts. If the default shipping state is that only the keys used by the currently-installed OS are valid, well, that's just the only sane default. But that's not how this is being done.
      • kvb 14y ago
        Is that really an issue with Microsoft/UEFI/secure boot, or is the problem that OEMs aren't building firmware that does what you want?
        • takluyver 14y ago
          Well, for ARM devices, Microsoft doesn't allow OEMs to provide a way to change the keys. For what it's worth, I think Microsoft are doing this for the security reasons they give. But I think they were well aware of the hurdle it would present to Linux distributions when they chose to do it.
• tomjen3 14y ago
  Linux hasn't won the desktop -- but it will one day when everybody just use an Android tablet. And nobody will have noticed.
  • acuozzo 14y ago
    > but it will one day when everybody just use an Android tablet. I doubt an Android tablet will __ever__ be able to process my post-production renders in a reasonable amount of time. This is the #1 thing I do with my desktop computer at home.
    • wcchandler 14y ago
      What if instead of your desktop, you had a low-end server that was fairly cheap (~$1000) that could process it, quicker, cheaper, and more efficiently than your desktop? And better yet, the server is stored in a closet, never to see the light of day because it "just works" on your network? You're in complete control over it, giving it varying heavy tasks from whatever lightweight appliance you're using. Be it rendering video, playing a game, streaming media, storing data, etc...
      • xradionut 14y ago
        You mean the Windows 2008 R2 server that I have at home? Or the Ubuntu server that I have at home? Can't be the DG/UX server, that's sitting in the garage awaiting the metal scrappers.
    • dyeje 14y ago
      You know the funny thing is I bet somebody said something along the lines of "I doubt a $LAPTOP will ever be able to do $THING." not too long ago. Yet here we are.
    • mixmastamyk 14y ago
      Statistically insignificant.
    • huxley 14y ago
• Irregardless 14y ago
  Everything about Windows 8 seems designed to benefit Microsoft by herding consumers into their new walled garden. Steve Jobs would be so proud of MS if he were around to see this (aside from the fact that the UI is a disaster). That's the main reason I'm now shopping for a computer with Linux pre-installed, and I really hope more people are doing the same. I have almost zero familiarity with Linux and dread the prospect of having to learn a new OS on my everyday computer, but Windows 8 is just THAT repulsive.
  • bitwize 14y ago
    Steve Jobs would be so proud of MS if he were around to see this (aside from the fact that the UI is a disaster). If he were around to see this, he'd consider it a stolen business model and start lawyering up.
  • takluyver 14y ago
    Good luck. Depending on where you live, there are now some good options for computers with Linux installed.
  • qdog 14y ago
    Depending on what you need you could buy a Chromebook for $200-250. I was considering getting one, and then installing linux on an SD card (assuming this works on the Samsung Chromebook, have only vaguely looked into it). If you are into games and are looking to run Steam, I suppose you want more horsepower. I usually buy stuff off of Newegg and build my own if it's not a laptop.
    • Irregardless 14y ago
      True, I hadn't considered a Chromebook. It could probably do everything I need with EC2 or Linode, but I'm afraid that might up the learning curve a little too much since I'd be completely new to all of those environments.
  • keithpeter 14y ago
    Well, I have used Linux at home since about 2006 or so (Ubuntu 6.06 being the first release where I decided not to dual boot with XP). I would not say that there is a lot to learn especially except for some of the plumbing (networks for instance) that works differently.
• yason 14y ago
  If you want to "win" then you must think about your achievements. Focusing on where you're being screwed keeps you being screwed. In the last 20 years, Linux has taken over many domains. First servers. The big win that made Linux impossible to ignore. Ten years later a major shift to the userland was mobile: there are half a billion Android devices sold. Not to mention embedded systems. Meanwhile, Linux has also become the way to build supercomputers: the world's fastest supercomputers these days mean assembling huge Tesla GPU racks to run Linux. While I do realize that secure boot can make Linux's life harder, I also realize that Linux per se isn't going anywhere or isn't attacked by Microsoft but general purpose computers are suffering from exhausted momentum. There are more and more devices that come with a preinstalled system, such as Android and iOS and the traditional desktop/laptop paradigm of buying hardware and installing whatever you want to run on it will continue to move into the marginal. I predict that eventually it's the programmers who will be the only ones who exercise tasks of so varying nature that they need a more complex interface, something like what I'm using now. Most of the rest of people can manage with mostly touching a screen to use applications that offer a set of predefined capabilities, occasionally hooking up a keyboard. The era of immutable operating systems with applications installable from a prefiltered app store is probably what actually works for most people. It's us programmers who long for the days when hardware was to be bought and software was to be written because we know that the lowest layer must always be there. For us, it was the very definition of a computer: programming hardware was all there ever was to computers. But most people don't need that. Most people are perfectly happy with an appliance. They don't want to install updates or manage their system, they just click the power button and immediately continue from where they left the last time. They want an application and they tap it and it gets installed without clicking through a dozen pages of a helper wizard or aptitude install commands. And appliances such as tablets and phones and touchscreen laptops deliver a much better experience for non-programmers. What we as programmers see as a bad thing is that programming will be removed farther from the end users. We all know how we started with playing games and ended up writing our own games because our computers allowed, and to an extent, suggested that. We would want to preserve that heritage to the future whizkids and future programmers. But that's still got a perspective bias: most people so far still haven't "found it" even if their computer would have allowed it. It's just us for which "finding it" was the revelation, and we know we would've "found it" anyway, somehow. Maybe they'll be selling a limited stock of programmer's computers in ten years that are fully programmable. There's definitely a market for those because you can't write the nice appliances without a real programmers' computer. Maybe my grandkids will receive one of my old programmer's workstations from my work place, and use that deprecated hardware to teach themselves programming and find it a thousand times more interesting than playing games on their phones, much like my predecessors managed to hook themselves up with cheap nighttime computing time in a mainframe at their father's workplace and abused those cycles to write games to entertain themselves.
• jiggy2011 14y ago
  "Every purchase of a Windows license is an attack on Linux. Linux has not won, and Microsoft is as dangerous as ever." This just seems silly. How is this an "attack", does the Linux foundation somehow lose funding proportional to the number of Windows licenses sold?
  • azakai 14y ago
    The attack is not windows licenses being sold, it's the new 'secure boot' thing.
    • jiggy2011 14y ago
      The article literally said what I quoted above.
• cooldeal 14y ago
  >The biggest flaw in Secure Boot is the spec requires a single Platform Key. You can add more keys, but they must be signed by the Platform Key I think this that is just wrong, can someone please verify? I thought the user could add their own master keys to boot their own OSes apart from being able to disable secure boot as mandated by Microsoft for Windows certification (as much as it can force OEMs without the anti-trust rulings stopping it from mandating requirements to OEMs). There is so much FUD and misinformation spread by folks who you would think be otherwise smart and knowledgeable that it's hard to find to what to believe and what not to.
  • Locke1689 14y ago
    You are correct. On x86 you can put UEFI in "Custom Mode," which allows you to add keys which were not signed by the platform key.
• Finster 14y ago
  >Every purchase of a Windows license is an attack on Linux. Oh, Linux community, shine on, you crazy diamond!
• noonespecial 14y ago
  There are "user interface appliances" and then there are the general purpose computers that actually do the hard work of the internet. That Microsoft moved some "beige box" computers from one category to the other by adding secure boot is not really news.
• Nux 14y ago
  "I think UEFI Secure Boot is a shuck and a bald-faced Microsoft anti-competitive tool." <- DAMN RIGHT!
  • sbuk 14y ago
    This I agree with 100%. If only thr rhetoric were dialled down more elsewhere. I'd take Linux users more seriously then.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• dschiptsov 14y ago
  It couldn't be dangerous because it doesn't produce any quality software, instead, it is just annoying, trying to make things more complicated for people, because it cannot produce any good software, but still can collect fees.)
• stephengillie 14y ago
  What about the Shim to get around secure boot? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4868856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4868856
• blhack 14y ago
  Is anybody seriously running linux on their desktop anymore outside of hobbyism? Okay, I joke, I know several people who run linux on their desktop. It seems like something that you grow out of, though. I use a mac, and most of the people I know who /really/ know [1]linux do too. In fact, the person I know who "knows linux" the most inside and out runs an ancient PPC macbook. I think he said he installed Ubuntu on his machine at work, though. The reason for this is that we all run linux* on our servers. My primary machine is a VPS from linode which runs gentoo linux, and has for a very long time. The aforementioned PPC macbook guy doesn't really have a primary machine anymore. He is getting into power electronics, and is more likely to be sitting at an oscilloscope than a laptop. Lately, my hobby box has been a raspberry pi which I'm looking to make it into a telepresence robot for our lab. Interestingly, live streaming video from a linux machine doesn't quite seem like a "solved" problem yet. It's lots of twiddling ffmpeg to make things work; things still aren't "plug and play". This is cool, by the way, it feels like the first time I stayed up all night installing gentoo. -- I guess that for my peer group, linux was something that felt really revolutionary and new and important 10 years ago. We were battling against the big bad microsoft, THIS was going to be the year of the linux desktop! (No, MOM! You have to install Suse! It's totally easy let me show you!). Then...we won. Linux is just a tool for me. Like a hammer. When I want to use it, I pick it up and use it. It doesn't feel revolutionary and important anymore because it just feels /obvious/. [1]: It's a bit silly to say "linux". I'm generally not specifically using any of the features of the linux kernel. Most of what I'm doing could easily be replicated on a *BSD system. Although this whole "gnu plus linux" debate thing is a bit silly. When I say "linux" people know what I mean. Sorry, Stallman :(
  • bwanab 14y ago
    Uh, yeah. My whole family runs linux on the desktop almost exclusively. I'm the only one who ever boots into Windows and it's only because that's the only way I can get into my company's system when working from home.
    • gcb 14y ago
      Same here. But i give it to the first poster that using linux is a pain. trying to buy a new laptop for my wife and i'm going crazy trying to map the reasonably priced options with the linux support i will get from the hardware.
• cardine 14y ago
  I get the feeling the author doesn't like Microsoft.