Ubuntu 17.10's Laptop Issue Appears To Be Under Control, Fixable

[DanL]

it's NOT specific to Ubuntu, there's been reports of it affecting Antergos users too.

Shhh, don't ruin Spooktra's witch hunt with facts.

[Spooktra]

Every time I install Ubuntu 17.10 on a Lenovo laptop the BIOS gets corrupted. Every time a rooster crows the sun rises. BREAKING NEWS: correlation doesn't imply causation.

You don't need to be a computer expert to figure this one out. There are just a lot of morons with masters degrees in the USA.

Where to even begin, I know, I'll begin by mocking you.

When the rooster crows as the Sun rises there is a both a correlation and a causation, the problem lies with the order in which you state the two. The rooster crowing does not cause the Sun to rise, but the Sun rising does cause the rooster to crow.

If you have a Lenovo laptop and can successfully install Fedora, Ubuntu LTS, Arch, Manjaro, Suse Leap and Tumbleweed, Debian, Mint, Solus, any BSD and Windows without any problems but installing Ubuntu 17.10 results in a corrupted BIOS then it's a "witch hunt" if I blame Canonical?

[Britoid]

This is Ubuntu's fault, any any distro that enables the relevant kernel option.

They enabled CONFIG_SPI_INTEL_SPI_PLATFORM which has a warning attached to it, when there was a known bug with 4.13 breaking BIOSs from a month ago, that was fixed in 4.14.

[andyprough]

First; Apple won't get such troubles because MacOS is only limited to their machines. So they are just giving guarentee about small number of devices which they are fully controlled by Apple.

Second ; Microsoft won't get such troubles because device manufacturers ( like Lenovo or Asus ,Msi etc ) are testing their devices with Windows and they make it compatible with Windows . Microsoft is not testing their devices on their OS.

Yeah, but Apple and MS would still get nailed to the wall, as OP said. Apple even worse, if their own hardware had the problem. And don't think Apple doesn't screw up big-time just because they control the entire stack. How many reports have we seen now of people losing all their iCloud data due to Apple glitches, just for one problem?

And MS would get nailed to the wall just because they are MS. I think the overreaction responses to OP's overreaction comment are a bit of an overreaction.

[monraaf]

I am a devout Ubuntu user, consider it the best distro currently available with only Solus, Mageia, GhostBSD and OpenIndiana coming close but Canonical is a company that generated 126 million bucks last year, there is no excuse for the lack of Q&A testing that resulted in this mess, if Apple or Microsoft had this happen to them we would be ready to nail them to the nearest wall; if Linux is ever to become a credible player on the desktop we can't have these things happening in 2017.

Why are you blaming Canonical for bugs which exist in Lenovo's EFI implementation?

Being able to talk to the firmware is part of the specification. If the firmware doesn't perform any sanity checks of the values being changed, the firmware is buggy, not the kernel driver.

Also, the issue is not Ubuntu-specific. It was just found on Ubuntu because they have a very large userbase as compared to many other distributions.

[dragon321]

Ubuntu isn't without blame. SPI driver is disabled by default and there is warning which contains information that this driver may contain bugs and be enabled only if user needs it and know what he is doing. I don't know why Canonical enabled this, because most of their users probably doesn't need it, and if they need it they can compile own kernel easily. This is kinda dangerous driver and shouldn't be enabled by default.

[starshipeleven]

Why is it this problem only occurs with the latest Ubuntu 17.10 spins?

Bzzt!
Scientific method tips: Lack of evidence is NOT evidence. If there is no data you just don't know.

Clearly Canonical changed something in the way they initialize the driver during the boot process and they are fucking up people's computers.

Bzzt!
Scientific method tips: Logical reasoning can at most lead to a cool hypothesis. You need to find evidence that proves or disproves your hypothesis to turn it into conclusions.

Canonical's kernel is open source. You can go and see the source, and compare it with upstream. The evidence is out there.

[starshipeleven]

Yeah, but Apple and MS would still get nailed to the wall, as OP said.

Actually no, if a Windows PC fails people usually blame the brand.

Apple even worse, if their own hardware had the problem. And don't think Apple doesn't screw up big-time just because they control the entire stack.

Apple can be safely blamed of his faults as they do control the whole thing. Ubuntu cannot. They don't make hardware.

[eltomito]

I am a devout Ubuntu user, consider it the best distro currently available with only Solus, Mageia, GhostBSD and OpenIndiana coming close but Canonical is a company that generated 126 million bucks last year, there is no excuse for the lack of Q&A testing that resulted in this mess, if Apple or Microsoft had this happen to them we would be ready to nail them to the nearest wall; if Linux is ever to become a credible player on the desktop we can't have these things happening in 2017.

Wow! That's pro-level trolling! I'm a great admirer of your work!

[PackRat]

Ubuntu isn't without blame. SPI driver is disabled by default and there is warning which contains information that this driver may contain bugs and be enabled only if user needs it and know what he is doing. I don't know why Canonical enabled this, because most of their users probably doesn't need it, and if they need it they can compile own kernel easily. This is kinda dangerous driver and shouldn't be enabled by default.

I just don't know what to think about Linux anymore. Every single disto i have ever tried has had problems or my own stupidity has caused problems, but man oh man "Linux Bricks your computer".