while i absolutely agree with this sentiment, i feel like "Microsoft" as a boogeyman has become far more toothless since secureboot first took flight in 2006. the same people who clamored and wailed about secureboot on windows laptops snored through most of Apples worst laptop freedom offenses.
in 2022 there isnt an single manufacturer that doesnt offer (albeit sometimes sporadically) a Linux laptop. system76 and others exist to deliver the linux laptop and desktop, and Google flat-out refused to do any EFI on chromebook because, surprise, it wasnt really necessary. The average chromebook in 2022 has a cogent enough arm processor to handle daily compute on a wide variety of distros with ease.
Battlestation vendors like Asus will likely seek the rubber stamp for their laptop products that ship with windows, but for liquid cooled battle station geeks the same motherboards will ship with open EFI to run whatever keys you want to, or dont.
> Google flat-out refused to do any EFI on chromebook because, surprise, it wasnt really necessary. The average chromebook in 2022 has a cogent enough arm processor to handle daily compute on a wide variety of distros with ease.
Google is in no way a model to follow. They actually make it more complicated to install _native_ Linux than x86 PC manufacturers, what with their "developer mode", often ridiculous, physical hardware manipulation requirements to enable it, and non-removable Scary Boot Prompts unless you completely overwrite the full system firmware. In other words: Google is actually worse right now than MS would be on x86 even if they MS extended this Secured Core crap to all other PC manufacturers. It doesn't matter much that they use open-source firmware if they lock it down worse than the rest.
And "containerized Linux" like Crouton misses the point and anyway MS is doing it too! (so much for those who say MS does not care about the Linux desktop market share).
in 2022 there isnt an single manufacturer that doesnt offer (albeit sometimes sporadically) a Linux laptop. system76 and others exist to deliver the linux laptop and desktop, and Google flat-out refused to do any EFI on chromebook because, surprise, it wasnt really necessary. The average chromebook in 2022 has a cogent enough arm processor to handle daily compute on a wide variety of distros with ease.
Battlestation vendors like Asus will likely seek the rubber stamp for their laptop products that ship with windows, but for liquid cooled battle station geeks the same motherboards will ship with open EFI to run whatever keys you want to, or dont.