There are certain boards that don't have an option to turn off Secure Boot, I saw one being mentioned in one of the previous Secure Boot threads. And actually, there is one mentioned in James Bottomley's post comments, the HP G7 Pavilion.
I also find this particular complaint to be a bit misguided. Secure Boot, as long as it has a mandatory opt-out option, doesn't really break any laws. The ones breaking it are board manufacturers that ship broken UEFIs, and that's who should be punished for it. About time to do that, too, since BIOS and UEFIs have a long history of being utterly broken.
The UEFI of the PC I'm currently on couldn't even boot anything off EFI files, as it would cause it to immediately crash. In fact, it wouldn't even recognise EFI files as executable if they were on NTFS partitions. And that's required for the Windows installer to run, even, not Linux. So the neglect there is mind-boggling. Thankfully it was (quietly) fixed in a subsequent update to the UEFI. I've also seen a report that some other UEFIs from the same manufacturer would only boot entries named "Windows Bootloader" or such. Again it was solved in an update, but how do they let such issues happen in the first place is beyond me.
And traditional BIOSs are not much better. Just yesterday I battled with one BIOS just to boot GPartEd. And I lost, for the moment. That BIOS is so utterly broken that it wouldn't boot off any USB storage whatsoever. Trying to boot GPartEd results in a black screen with "_" shining in it. And trying to boot something even simpler, like memtest86+, results in... the system immediately rebooting. Yeap. I could leave it there, and it would be stuck in an infinite booting loop forever, never getting to the point where it's supposed to try booting the executables in the first place. And that's not all - disabling USB 2.0 makes it ignore attached USB keyboards. It detects USB storage devices, but not keyboards, no. even despite the fact that USB keyboard support is explicitly enabled in the BIOS settings and there is no reason why they couldn't run over USB 1.0. So that's just horrible. I'm not even sure how I'm supposed to update the firmware there, given that it hates USB devices so much.
I also find this particular complaint to be a bit misguided. Secure Boot, as long as it has a mandatory opt-out option, doesn't really break any laws. The ones breaking it are board manufacturers that ship broken UEFIs, and that's who should be punished for it. About time to do that, too, since BIOS and UEFIs have a long history of being utterly broken.
The UEFI of the PC I'm currently on couldn't even boot anything off EFI files, as it would cause it to immediately crash. In fact, it wouldn't even recognise EFI files as executable if they were on NTFS partitions. And that's required for the Windows installer to run, even, not Linux. So the neglect there is mind-boggling. Thankfully it was (quietly) fixed in a subsequent update to the UEFI. I've also seen a report that some other UEFIs from the same manufacturer would only boot entries named "Windows Bootloader" or such. Again it was solved in an update, but how do they let such issues happen in the first place is beyond me.
And traditional BIOSs are not much better. Just yesterday I battled with one BIOS just to boot GPartEd. And I lost, for the moment. That BIOS is so utterly broken that it wouldn't boot off any USB storage whatsoever. Trying to boot GPartEd results in a black screen with "_" shining in it. And trying to boot something even simpler, like memtest86+, results in... the system immediately rebooting. Yeap. I could leave it there, and it would be stuck in an infinite booting loop forever, never getting to the point where it's supposed to try booting the executables in the first place. And that's not all - disabling USB 2.0 makes it ignore attached USB keyboards. It detects USB storage devices, but not keyboards, no. even despite the fact that USB keyboard support is explicitly enabled in the BIOS settings and there is no reason why they couldn't run over USB 1.0. So that's just horrible. I'm not even sure how I'm supposed to update the firmware there, given that it hates USB devices so much.
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