MSFT vs Linux on desktop: still relevant?
10-15 years ago, a post like this would’ve gotten the slashdot crowd all riled up about free software and the “evil empire”.
I’d say it doesn’t matter any more. There is increased competition in the market and don’t know of anybody dual booting. I buy hardware to run Linux and if it allows only crypto signed kernels via UEFI, I’m going to buy something else.
There is another reason why dual booting doesn’t work: the ubuntu installer. My last two attempts at installing ubuntu on a disk with multiple partitions (some Linux, some windows) resulted in data loss. Yeah - I know about the big warnings that the installer shows. But admit it - people are lazy.
In one instance, ubuntu was being installed to an external hard drive and it overwrote the boot sector of my first (windows) hard drive. In the second instance, I told ubuntu 11.04 specifically not to touch an old partition containing /home, but it ignored me and formatted it with ext4 anyway. Hope to be wiser and less lazy next time.
