Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rizz | Hacker News Reader

Why should I vet my system before buying it? I've seen Linux advertised as "it runs on everything" plenty of times, and for well over a decade. It's rare to see someone who evangelizes Linux to say that hardware support on Linux is inadequate for a non-technical user to just make the switch.

If that is indeed the case I think it would be tremendously important to fix that.

View on HN

It used to be the case that Linux just ran on everything, until Microsoft started throwing their monopoly weight around again, and insisting upon UEFI (better called "Restricted Boot"). http://www.FSF.org/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted-boot http://TechRights.org/wiki/index.php/UEFI

Meh :/ I started with the techrights link, and first looked at the 3rd link, "Installing GNU/Linux is Still Hard Due to UEFI" to learn, and the source article it was based on actually had the writer saying there was no problem at all with uefi+secure boot on, his linux just installed and worked fine on his new laptop. The other two february links weren't much better, at worst an already fixed bug, that did not originate at Microsoft... The FSF link seems more technically accurate as far as I can tell as a non-linux, non-uefi user, but most of their problems are hypothetical and not so much practical problems for now.

Are there better sources to read up on this, or is the controversy a bit over blown?

All my computers run UEFI if possible, and all of them run Linux.

I have no problems with UEFI whatsoever; in fact, I think it's a nice improvement to the dated BIOS technology. The Microsoft thing called "Secure Boot" might pose a problem, but I never activate that anyway.

People need to stop confounding UEFI with Secure Boot.

It isn't UEFI, it is peripheral manufacturers who hate Linux for whatever reason. Broadcom, Creative, Nvidia, and others all have legacies of horrible device support in the kernel.

You can't blame Linus for that. If a company doesn't want to push what is often only a few hundred lines of C to make their devices work under Linux, thats their right. But you can't blame the ecosystem for the companies choices not to support it. It is like buying Nexus 7 and bitching about how Windows doesn't run on it.

> "it runs on everything"

There is a distinction here - Linux, the kernel, runs on pretty much every CPU in the universe. If it is presented with any CPU and chipset ever made, it can run on that.

Your PCI devices, your USB devices, etc are not guaranteed to have Linux drivers for that hardware. And if the producers of said hardware don't release driver documentation or support a Linux driver directly, you can't blame the Linux community for not being magicians that can force private companies to bend to their will.

Hell, Broadcom - one of the worst FOSS companies, in the same class as Nvidia for the longest time - is finally producing scant upstream NIC drivers. They support a tiny fraction of their product range, and they have another 2 proprietary drivers on top of those for Linux and those don't work either, but the situation is improving.

But that is all you can do. There is no "sit down and code" answer for undocumented motherboards, bad EFI implementations, and a 15 button mouse with a 50MB proprietary driver on Windows. Well, the latter actually you can just wireshark the usb bus and get all the signaling for the buttons, but that is a lot of work to do what the company itself could have done in minutes (publish the opcode manual they obviously have on the thing).

> If that is indeed the case I think it would be tremendously important to fix that.

You can't "fix" people to stop them from talking out of their ass.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com