SUSE details its EFI Secure Boot plans

Sure, but the practical truth is that the Dane is here to stay anyway because all your neighbors already paid him off.

Secure boot isn't going away. It has some value to consumers (albeit not nearly as much as some people want to think). So we have to live with it as best as we can. The Fedora/SUSE compromise (load a shim which then checks a signature for the real bootloader) seems straightforward. The Ubuntu one (sign a shim that will load anything) is preferable to me personally, but IMHO isn't likely to survive as it's basically a security hole by definition.

I'm with you on this, and I intend to vote with my wallet.

The "Post PC" revolution (which I've dissected elsewhere) may have some benefits like multi-touch, but the attempt to lock the hardware will fail. Commodities have always buried vertical walled gardens by sheer economies of scale. The only caveat would be a monopoly; help defeat this attempt by giving http://www.coreboot.org a try.

You'll like the Chromebook solution then. Flip a hardware switch and you can boot whatever you like.

There is a market for closed solutions and that market isn't us; it's technophobes of all stripes who just want their devices to work and want someone else to worry about the how.

To extend an analogy: I know how to make coffee and like to know that I can buy my beans, grind them as I like, and brew them with the right temperature water at the right time. I don't ever want someone to take that option away from me. In practice, 90% of the time I drink coffee from my Keurig. I pay more and get coffee that is suboptimal for some tastes, but it's good enough for my purposes so the trade off is worth it.

I think a lot of people like their machines to operate this way too. Apple has proven that this model can work and will be embraced. We're in for MORE of this, not less, and it's the market that's going to allow it to happen.

If anything, what the market is telling us is that choice isn't always a good thing. The vast number of options and configurations (along with innumerable failure modes) is perceived as a market failure, not a success.