Jan. 22nd, 2013

ITWire ran a story on the 12th of January entitled "Fedora still has problems with secure boot". It ends up discussing two issues with the author's experience with the Fedora installer - that he can't reclaim any free space on existing drives, and that the installer didn't automatically add entries for Windows to the grub menu. These are certainly legitimate issues, and I don't want to suggest that it's reasonable for people to have to manually alter their configuration in order to support dual boot. But they're not issues with Fedora's support for secure boot, despite the enthusiasm with which certain people have jumped on the story. We've received one credible report of a secure boot related problem with Fedora on a couple of Toshiba laptops, which appears (and I want to stress that we're still working on diagnosing it) to be a firmware bug rather than any kind of problem with Fedora.

Mistakes happen in journalism, and sometimes there are differences of opinion. But this story is simply wrong. When asked about it in the comments, the author failed to support his position. When contacted, the editor in chief was willing to add a note saying that I disputed the arguments but was unwilling to remove the incorrect claims. As a result, the internet remains full of links and reposts of an article that unashamedly tells users that the current Linux distribution with the best UEFI hardware support has issues with something it has no issues with.

For reasons that are unclear to me, ITWire seems to have some sort of well regarded status in the Australian technical industry. It seems entirely undeserved.

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Matthew Garrett

About Matthew

Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Aurora. Ex-biologist. [personal profile] mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer. Also on Mastodon.

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