OMG! Linux

I have plenty of hard disagreements on the "user experience improvements" in Linux. "Adding a skin" is not easy and making the experience somewhat coherent is extremely hard (GNOME is sort of successful at an extreme cost and plenty of limitations, KDE is still an incoherent mess with plenty of bad defaults starting from the base CDDM skin). It's full of things like the missing icon view in the GNOME/GTK file chooser [1] and while it's true that Windows11 is atrocious, all those little things add up.

I actually recovered a laptop my family was using to launch firefox by installing linux on it (soldered ram went bad, linux is the only OS I could use to tell it to skip the bad blocks through kernel command line) but I hold no illusion about its level of "user experience". Just look at the comments in this recent thread [2]. And as a power user I am baffled by some of the choices at the kernel level (which I mentioned in that thread) and others closer to the user by distros (ubuntu and snaps, name an iconic duo), or things like flatpak not being close to ready and still shoved down user's throats...

I spent years when I was younger submitting bug reports for the papercuts I noticed - some ignored for years, some closed and forgotten forever when some project decided to move on from bugzilla - and I have no more time or energy to continue doing so. The maintainers after all write the code, I'm just a user and get no voice :)

I've been reading about the "year of linux" for…

> A Linux USB most likely requires Secure Boot to be turned off to boot

That hasn't been my experience. All the recent laptops I've owned (Dell and HP) had a default secure boot setup that allowed booting to Ubuntu and Fedora without disabling Secure Boot. In fact, nowadays even Ventoy works with Secure Boot [0], and I've managed to use it with the setting enabled on all machines I've tested, however in this case you might need to enroll the keys on the first boot, which I imagine will trigger BitLocker.

Apparently what happened is that Microsoft now signs some third party certs for common Linux distributions, and some setups allow these to boot by default. However, it also looks like Microsoft wants these certs disabled by default [1], which should improve BitLocker integrity on average.

Although I believe what happened in OP's situation was that BitLocker wasn't actually enabled or working, likely due to misconfiguration or lack of any.

[0]: https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_secure.html

[1]: https://www.omglinux.com/boot-linux-modern-lenovo-thinkpads-bios-setting/

> > I’ve complained about this before, but I’ve been hearing “Microsoft is going to block you from installing Linux!” since like 2004 [...]

> If you keep track of the changes to the BIOS firmware, you can see the changes. Their minuscule but happening. We don't have full blow preventing from disabling secure boot yet, but it appears to me that's were this is going.

Case in point: until recently, even with SecureBoot enabled by default, you could boot Linux distributions which have their bootloader signed by Microsoft, without going into the firmware setup screen. Nowadays, at least with some Lenovo models, you have to go to the firmware setup screen, and either enable a cryptically named option or disable SecureBoot. A quick web search gave me https://www.omglinux.com/boot-linux-modern-lenovo-thinkpads-bios-setting/ which has a screenshot, and which mentions that this is a new Microsoft requirement (instead of something Lenovo came up with).

Actually, yes, they did so also on (some) vendors' x86 firmware: https://www.omglinux.com/boot-linux-modern-lenovo-thinkpads-bios-setting/

These default firmware settings will prevent "third-party"-MSFT-signed EFI binaries from loading - gee, I wonder why that distinction is suddenly necessary, too? :)

In my view and experience, the threat model that Secure Boot and similar schemes to establishing a root of trust to assure that "noone (esp. not the owner) has tampered with this device" tries to protect against is VERY rarely relevant (to the owner of said device). The times that I have been inconvenienced or even prevented by that stuff from getting the software I, the owner of the device, want installed onto hardware that I paid good money for at a store/vendor have been numerous, however.

> It's a maximum of 4 videos at once

Hmm, what? Do you mean like max 4 participants in Teams calls? No I don't think there's a restriction like that, it should work exactly the same as the Electron version. Our team also has more than 4 people. Maybe you are thinking some restrictions on the free version of Teams? If you or your company is paying for Teams/Office, then you get the same "premium" features on the PWA as you would with the Electron app when you login.

If you go to teams.microsoft.com with Chrome or Edge and login, it should suggest installing the PWA [1].

1: https://www.omglinux.com/microsoft-teams-pwa-now-available-on-linux/