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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

My latest PC was a pretty randomly chosen Chinese PC from Amazon that advertised Ubuntu compatibility. In other words, except that advantage to slowly slip away from Microsoft too.

It's been years since I really put any effort into checking before buying - it had gotten to the point I could assume that issues would be minor and/or resolved soon after purchase.

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Those PC's look like great value and availability and are clearly very popular - have squeezed out other options like Intel NUC. Very tempting.

But I've heard that you pretty much never get a BIOS update and the quality of any such update is going to be dubious. Nothing sinister about this - it is simply a bargain basement option.

So, you are really throwing security out the window.

Security shouldn't be much of an issue with most modern CPUs. The microcode can be updated at boot time by the kernel, even if the one loaded by the BIOS is out of date. So microcode level patches are taken care of.

That leaves attacks on secure boot, which could be feasible with a bad implementation, but I doubt most home users would have to worry about an evil maid attack.

Yeah, it's just not a factor. If it was a laptop that I randomly left unattended a lot or used on unsecured networks, maybe I'd care.

I've never in my life applied a bios update. It's really not on any list of things I'd care about.

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