Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

I have to believe most of us here on HN are in the boat of keeping a W11 partition for work and a Linux partition for everything else at this point.

Except, in the future, your Linux partition will be unable to access most online services because they'll all rely on remote attestation to check if your device is running an unmodified Windows OS, similar to what many android apps already do.

Except some will fake that attestation too.

> to check if your device is running an unmodified windows OS

Remote attestation sounds secure in theory but its Achilles heel is that at the remote end sb will have to perform a judgement of what „an modified OS“ is. And any wrong decision will stress test that sb‘s support division and might be subject to litigation. Likely there will be some industry standard white list which itself might be subject to manipulation (similar to the compromised SSL root certificates we had years ago).

I can’t imagine this will be set in place for all available PC software.

Furthermore, attestation happens during run time of a software stack that might itself be vulnerable to exploits. An attacker might find a way to short-circuit remote attestation w/o the remote party knowing.

See also:

https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06wi/final...

(TFA linked this, too.)

I switched to full time macOS in 2019 from a 15 year background professionally on Windows in IT admin/architect type roles.

Granted, at that point Windows was web browser, IDE, and remoting into Linux machines for 95% of my work.

I appreciate having first class support for all my command line tools and utils, which I generally get on macOS. I have linuxified my macOS experience, installing and pathing gnu versions of everything you would normally expect. I rarely use the utils from macOS.

I have a Windows gaming PC that hasn't been powered on this year.

I like my MBP battery life and lack of futzing needed for my work (I do use better touch tool, but that's it).

I have turned down further interviews if I find out I'm going to be saddled with a corporate locked down Windows laptop.

I would like to think so too, but the reality seems to be a lot of Windows-only or macOS-only folks.

I don’t use Windows for work or home. I keep a VM around for the couple of times a year someone sends me a word document.

You can run older Word versions (up to 2016 I believe) very well inside wine. It’s even easy to install (PlayOnLinux e.g. guided you through the install). No need for a windows license.

I've found libreoffice to work well enough for any docx simple enough to have come from an older version of Word, but I might just be ignorant of how Word actually differs from the tools I use to view it; it just works for me ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯ I do find the suite rather large, but use functional package management to keep most of it's files abstracted away-- I bet the appimage or flatpak is pretty sweet in the same way

Nope. Least, not me. Windows 11 pro for workstations on my personal desktop. Linux in WSL2. Linux in docker.

> I have to believe most of us here on HN are in the boat of keeping a W11 partition for work and a Linux partition for everything else at this point.

If statistics bear out, you'd be incorrect (at least with regards to a non-Windows OS being run by 'most').

I also imagine I'm not the only one who doesn't use their work laptop for personal stuff (even on a separate partition). At my previous job, I never even took my work laptop home, and in my current remote job, my work laptop gets booted up at the start of each work day and shut down at the end; I have my own devices for non-work use.

If my job wants me to run Windows, they are free to supply a Windows machine for me to use.

I keep a bright line between personal equipment and work equipment.

Anyway, my last few jobs have given me Macs for development.

Not me. Any work I'm doing for an employer is done solely on equipment they supply and everything else is done solely on my own equipment. Never the twain shall meet. So my personal machines are all 100% Linux, and my work machines are all whatever my employer wants them to be.

I guess I do have multiple partitions after all, they're just on different machines!

If Windows is required for work then you've already lost. Seriously I'm unable to be productive in Windows (or Mac, I tried). I don't know what the stats are on employers requiring Windows but my current one doesn't (mainly because of a sizable chunk of Mac users, not that there's any support for Linux).

Lots of semiconductor design tools are Windows only.

So are CAD design tools.

Where I work pretty much everyone who's not a developer or system admin uses Windows. Most of them never leave the confines of Edge, Teams, Sharepoint, Outlook, and MS Office with maybe the exception being Zoom. It's an enterprise config of some sort so it more or less stays out of their way. Windows Home sounds absolutely horrific and I can't imagine why anyone uses it, other than they don't know anything else.

Then how are you going to do the majority of native desktop app/game development (where most of your users use Windows)?

I would bet the majority of gamers are actually on console by raw numbers. Appliances are super useful for normies.

And native desktop development is, like, 2% of enterprise development. Tops. And all the paying users are over on the mac side.

I don't develop or support anything on Windows. Sure that excludes 99.9% (I guess) of career options involving a computer, but I've still found employment that doesn't require Windows. But once either Microsoft finally succeeds at banning Linux from running on desktop PCs (which is basically what this is about), or every single employer requires everyone to run Windows, then I guess I'll switch careers to farming or something.

So you’re used to Linux. But there are people who can do your job faster than you who use windows or macOS. Just like there are people who will work slower and be limited compared to you.

Use what you prefer. I can use any and get my job done. All 3 have their own pros and cons.

QEMU emulates UEFI Secure Boot and a software TPM just fine. No need to dual boot.

they can block that extremely easily if they want to

(the article even mentions this)

The same thing will happen that always happens... some TPM vendor that has millions upon millions of devices in the field will have their private signing key leaked. MS won't be able to cripple millions of machines. Bam, before you know it someone has a patch for QEMU to have it emulate a device with random identifiers signed using the leaked key.

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