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Comment by glesica | Hacker News Reader

It seems like what MS may be getting (or trying to get), at least in part, from this is a return to (or continuation of, I suppose) GNU/Linux as strictly an "enthusiast" OS. A BIOS tweak won't stop me, but it would definitely stop my mom.

I'm currently in school and I see a surprising number of students using Ubuntu, even outside the CS department. Not a lot, by any means, but more than I would have guessed. I wonder how many of them would be using it if it required a weird workaround or really anything more than "put the disc in and reboot".

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> I wonder how many of them would be using it if it required a weird workaround or really anything more than "put the disc in and reboot".

Well, "put the disc in and reboot" doesn't work right now on most PCs, does it? You have to go into the BIOS and change the boot order, or pull up the boot menu to make a custom selection.

Even easier: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/install-ubuntu-with-wind...

It worked on the Thinkpad I bought a few weeks ago... I think most machines are configured to boot from the optical drive first. Even if there is a boot menu, that is still much less scary than having to hunt through a series of menus to find and change an obscure setting.

As we in this community are probably all aware, even small obstacles like having to enter a name or type a credit card number can drastically reduce conversion rates on the web. I think this is a reasonable analogue. Even objectively small obstacles can be important.

You said

> Even if there is a boot menu, that is still much less scary than having to hunt through a series of menus to find and change an obscure setting.

My mom heard

> Even if there is a scary series of menus to find and change an obscure setting, that is still much less scary than having to hunt through a series of menus to find and change an obscure setting.

> It seems like what MS may be getting (or trying to get), at least in part, from this is a return to (or continuation of, I suppose) GNU/Linux as strictly an "enthusiast" OS. A BIOS tweak won't stop me, but it would definitely stop my mom.

Microsoft is so very far from caring about any of this. They and their hardware partners can conceivably do a lot of damage to the Linux desktop experience through indifference, but that's what it is. Indifference.

Consider that Microsoft Azure offers Linux virtual machines, I doubt that is a major reason for a secure BIOS.

Completely different. Azure is for servers. Consumers don't use Azure for day-to-day computing. MS is hemorrhaging consumers, most to Apple and Android, but some to desktop GNU/Linux.

That last category might grow as people stop needing MS Office (reminder, we're talking about consumers here, not businesses) and other Windows-only products.

A secure BIOS that is unfriendly to alternative operating systems throws up a low, but possibly significant, barrier that could keep people from moving to Ubuntu and similar.

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