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Comment by cesarb | Hacker News Reader

> Linux kicked off in the 90s because young people at that time wanted a real OS

It's easy to underestimate how inferior MS-DOS was, unless you lived through it. Windows (3.x and later 9x) was slightly better, but still had severe issues. Modern Windows is, from what I've heard, a lot better, so the incentive to migrate is not as strong.

> Today, almost all kids use Cell Phones, which are all locked down.

Not just cell phones; with Secure Boot and BitLocker, computers are more locked down too. In particular, BitLocker means that it's harder to share disk space between Windows and an alternative operating system; back in the MS-DOS (and Windows 9x) days, it was not unusual to install Linux in a directory (or a disk image file) on the same partition used by the other operating system.

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> Not just cell phones; with Secure Boot and BitLocker, computers are more locked down too.

You can just disable secure boot, no? I just got a brand new laptop today, and I could just disable it. I know you can get Linux to work with it, but I can't be arsed to mess about with it and the practical security benefits for me are basically zero.

Also, don't underestimate the friction that existed in the 90s or early 00s. Nothing worked on Linux or BSD. My government sent me .doc files. Tons of stuff was Windows-only desktop software.[1] Mucking about with xfree86 -configure and /etc/X11/.... was far from easy or straight-forward. Internet access was far more rare and "just Google it" wasn't really a thing, etc. etc. etc.

If I look at the amount of effort I spent to "just get Linux running" back in 2000 or so when I first tried it vs. today, then I'm fairly sure the overall experience is a lot better today. Sure, you need to deal with some stupid nonsense, but that was always the case.

[1]: For all the hate the "modern web" gets from some people here: it does replace tons of crappy desktop stuff with an abstracted isolated VM which, among other benefits, makes running "alternative" systems like Linux or BSD far more viable.

> You can just disable secure boot, no? I just got a brand new laptop today, and I could just disable it. I know you can get Linux to work with it, but I can't be arsed to mess about with it and the practical security benefits for me are basically zero.

An imagined conversation:

“Mom, I want to disable secure boot so I can try a free operating system.”

“Oh no you don’t. Security is important.”

This won’t happen to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about, but it’s having a real impact on the pipeline for getting there. The conversation isn’t as imagined as all that.

Systems like Ubuntu, Suse, etc. should "just work" with secure boot. This has been the case for over 10 years (Ubuntu starting with 12.04, in a quick check). I just run a custom hacked-up version of Void Linux because I'm cool like that, but no one new to Linux is doing that – they start out with Ubuntu or such, just as I started out with Mandrake back in the day.

Also I actually got my laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed, a concept that barely existed in 2000.

Secure boots works great with Linux.

Some distros use the MS signed grub shim, but you can generally just go into the BIOS and whitelist whatever bootloader you installed (and optionally disable the factory-loaded MS keys, which I generally do, since I don’t dual boot).

>In particular, BitLocker means that it's harder to share disk space between Windows and an alternative operating system

BitLocker is completely optional, even on Windows 11 (although in some cases encryption does kick in automatically - but you can revert it).

And if you want to both use BitLocker and share files with another OS, you can easily do it with a separate unencrypted drive or partition.

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