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Comment by qwerta | Hacker News Reader

There will always be an option to install Linux on x86 somehow. But I found really disturbing growing number of locked ARM systems. Perhaps we could start 'green' campaign; freely installing Linux on such devices expands their moral life-time and causes less emission.

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See: Lenovo K800, Lava XOLO X900, or any of the new-ish X86 phones (Atom SoCs) with locked bootloaders that will only boot the pre-installed Android, or whatever originally came with the phone. You may revise and say "Sure, but I meant on the desktop..." but if current trends continue, tablets and phones will continue to supplant if not replace desktops/laptops for most users. Unless consumers put on the breaks and steer strongly towards open hardware, we're looking at a future with a lot of single-purpose/corporate-owned appliances IMHO. As usual, money talks, so: buy freedom.

Locked down ARM systems have far longer history than this fairly recent Win8 debacle. One of the most notable examples is TiVo, which led to the phrase "tivoization". I'd argue that the number of "open" ARM devices is what is growing with RasPi and others like it.

The problem is that locked ARM is becoming defacto standard. Soon most main-stream laptops will be ARM based and locked down. Compared to that current issues such as "should I accept EULA?" looks very small.

"always". What is this always scenario look like if MS decides to drop the "must allow legacy boot / disabling SB / enrolling key" requirement and only enroll theirs?

Not saying that will happen, I honestly don't think Microsoft cares that much (my own opinion, speculation based on Linux's market share despite my own love of it).

Just... "always" is a strong word. People used that word when talking about secure bootloaders on devices like Droid2, etc. Things that were ultimately only circumvented by kexec. Something that would be much different in a SecureBoot scenario.

Theirs may already be the only key used in practice, particularly with Linux companies embracing their signing key.

Hm, interesting point. They've effectively made themselves the perfect gate keeper. Even for people like us on HN, I highly highly doubt hardly anyone outside of mjg59 has ever enrolled their own key.

I'm even highly interested in PKI and SecureBoot and have been quelling FUD about it for sometime but if I ever buy a non Pixel/MBA device, I'll leave the MS key in there almost assuredly.

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