Increased Use Of Windows BitLocker Is Causing Headaches For Linux Dual Booting

[andyprough]

People still dual boot? Why exactly? Have they not heard of VMs?

Sounds like an obsessed gamer thing.

Good thing the geniuses at IBM are working on it. Maybe they can ask Microsoft sweetly to allow Lennart to write a dualboot-d module for systemd to handle it.

[patrakov]

Isn't this kind of the point of full disk encryption? To prevent 3rd party software from tampering with it in any way?

No. The goal should be to lock out unauthorized people, and that's it. 3rd party software is only an unfortunate technical detail.

[Neuro-Chef]

People still dual boot? Why exactly? Have they not heard of VMs?

Sounds like an obsessed gamer thing.

Performance sure is one possible reason, drivers for special devices can be another one.

[sinepgib]

birdie
They will care when we show their customers how broken and insecure windows is.

That saying is 10000 years old. Not gonna happen, and probably not even true. It might have been at some point tho.
What's less secure? A system where most people reject verified boots (and even those who accept it end up going with half-broken setups) so rootkits are easier to install, or one that doesn't? At least with Windows you can be certain whose software you run.

Microsoft's cloud business is thriving (up 28% vs a year earlier). Did you say something about Linux?

Aren't most Azure instances running Linux on the developer facing level? I mean, the cash is still theirs, obviously, but this means they need their cloud to have decent compatibility.

Microsoft's Office 365 business is thriving (up 19% vs a year earlier). Did you say something about LibreOffice?
Microsoft's Windows business is OK (down 2%). Did you say something about sold Linux desktop licenses? What about $0 outside of very specialized RedHat/Suse/Ubuntu contracts?

Overall they are doing great.

But nobody contended that Microsoft is still king for desktop. There are delusional Linux users around, but the person you quoted doesn't seem to be one.

They actually are concerned these days. Linux is overtaking Windows pretty much everywhere outside of desktops and "pretty much everywhere outside of desktops" is where the big money is at. Sever contracts, cloud hosting, software as a service, etc. Linux is kicking some Microsoft ass with those.

While that's true, Linux on the desktop still doesn't really matter, and most users in cloud hosting, embedded, etc, don't really care on a philosophical level. As long as Windows is good enough to cooperate with those uses, the reputation where it commercially matters is intact. WSL2 and Hyper-V support in Linux is all they need for that.

Isn't this kind of the point of full disk encryption? To prevent 3rd party software from tampering with it in any way?

Eh, more or less. You have TPM2. You have Secure Boot with authorized systems. You could perfectly well allow interaction between verified systems that could share decryption keys via TPM2.
(Of course, assuming you do have TPM2 or equivalent, otherwise you're screwed)

[andyprough]

Performance sure is one possible reason

As I said - obsessed gamers.

drivers for special devices can be another one

We've had USB pass-through in VMs for many years now. That's a very rare edge case where you can only access a specialized device directly from bare metal Windows. In which case you should probably just have a dedicated Windows box for it (or find better devices to use).

[birdie]

Volta as usual with his inane borderline idiotic statements.

Yeah, while Windows is choke full of real security measures, Linux users "enjoy" disabling Secure Boot, enabling random PPAs and compiling software from God knows what sources. So much security all around. And don't get me started that many run pretty much all commands via `sudo` because they don't quite understand why it's there. And that the sudo prompt [password] can be trivially sniffed unlike UAC which runs in an isolated environment none of your user applications have any access to. They can't even register it (it's rendered outside of your session).

[zamroni111]

I prefer run Linux as hyper v vm within windows rather than bare metal

[lejeczek]

Who gives a fuck of dual-boot and thus of Windows - personality-disordered individuals? no, really, seriously. Is that still in 2022 a thing?

[erniv2]

I prefer run Linux as hyper v vm within windows rather than bare metal

Ouch so true dont let the zealots catch you

Eh, more or less. You have TPM2. You have Secure Boot with authorized systems. You could perfectly well allow interaction between verified systems that could share decryption keys via TPM2.
(Of course, assuming you do have TPM2 or equivalent, otherwise you're screwed)

The grub upstream guys fight tooth and nail against that, thats the problem if you read the posts from the fedora and redhat guys it shows they have loads of patches pending for grub that dont get merged on time or just denied because of politics.

while systemd-boot seems to work but they can´t use that cause then they have to negotiate with microsoft again to keep the keys fedora has now, thats all just a hole mess.

[Danielsan]

Why should you dual-boot when you can use WSL? 😂😂😂