Try before you buy

I read last week already that Lenovo seems to be selling notebooks now which don’t allow to boot Linux or any other operating system from USB sticks anymore. Matthew Garrett, a Debian developer had discovered this, and I’ve found his blog post about it via Planet Debian. Now The Register also reports about it. And who asked Microsoft to “support” secure boot in the beginning? A bad idea in not only my opinion… this should be fixed, ASAP please.

So the best advice at the moment is that you should try before you buy – any new notebook or computer which comes pre-installed with Windows or with MacOS is generally a bad idea, and the best solution would be to build it yourself, and install your OS of choice. Since not everyone can do that, look out for vendors who pre-install Linux or other Libre software. This is possible and advisable even on “smart” phones, as this article from the FSFE shows. See here about what is possible with a phone, and with some good intentions…

We shouldn’t let the wrong people decide about the future, we’ll have to do that ourselves…

In case you’ll go to any big consumer electronics store/chain to try out notebooks, this would be a good OS to test them with.

As always, thanks for reading.

Update, from Friday July 15th, 2022: here’s an update from Michael Larabel on booting a new Lenovo X13 with Linux. You still have the problem that the reason for first boot failures is not even shown, thanks to Micro$oft. Fix this, guys… we don’t need that crap. Thanks.