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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

Holy cow, how are we just now finding out about this? So Microsoft is forcing you to buy yet another Windows license, after you already paid for the one included with the laptop, if you want to dual-boot?

This should been a scandal when Windows 8 launched.

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Not really. Installing Linux on a computer running UEFI is perfectly possible. It's just really hard. I'm typing this on just such a machine and it involved activating BIOS emulation and then when the Ubuntu purple loading disk screen came I needed to do a magic key-combo and set some options I don't remember. Then I needed to run bootrepair and instruct it to make Ubuntu UEFI bootable and finally I could turn off BIOS emulation.

It's hard as fucking hell.

My last two systems (desktops, I don't even have a working notebook right now, waiting for Broadwell) used Asrock and ASUS boards with EFI implementations that worked pretty well out of the box under Linux. One runs Suse 13.1, the other runs Arch. They both have their bugs - the Asrock system wipes the EFI boot table every firmware update, and the ASUS one can only have one entry in the EFI boot table, and neither has a working EFI shell - but I did my research to know they worked.

Anecdotal, but: I have linux installed on two machines with UEFI, and neither was much harder than a BIOS install. An extra step or two, but it didn't require more than a couple additional minutes.

Sounds like the Ubuntu installer might just suck for UEFI.

I installed Debian 7.4 on a Dell XPS 13 using a live hybrid ISO (`debian-live-7.4-amd64-standard+nonfree.iso`) two days ago. After enabling UEFI and adding the USB stick as a boot device, I had to do nothing out of the normal to get it to work. It was incredibly painless.

The linux experience now extends before installation ;)

It was, but the number of people spreading misinformation (like the top of this thread, or the article's author just a few days ago) was huge, and since nobody had firsthand experience with it, most people simply ignored.

Any problem you have with your computer now, you are required to buy another Windows copy.

I'm confused, could you please elaborate on this? I successfully dual-booted a second-hand (wiped hdd, etc) Lenovo Carbon X1 w/ Ubuntu and Win8 from MSDN media. It picked up the pre-loaded Win8 license without issue.

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