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mjg59ITWire 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.
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.
Isn't this defamation?
Date: 2013-01-22 11:49 pm (UTC)IYWire write up on Fedora 18
Date: 2013-01-23 03:19 am (UTC)for Microsoft. Something like "paid journalism". They will jump up and down on
non-issues, just to enhance the cause of their
backers.
Re: IYWire write up on Fedora 18
Date: 2013-01-23 05:50 am (UTC)/end of "I am so sick of every techie on earth thinking everything and everyone is just another shill for Microsoft", Jesus Christ can we can it already?
Re: IYWire write up on Fedora 18
Date: 2013-01-23 07:59 am (UTC)Re: IYWire write up on Fedora 18
Date: 2013-01-23 09:15 am (UTC)In the case of ITWire's Open Source "expert" Sam Varghese, this *definitely* applies.
From bad journalism to malicious
Date: 2013-01-23 04:51 pm (UTC)http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/
~Matt Jones
GRUB
Date: 2013-01-23 11:03 pm (UTC)I thought that the idea with UEFI is to have every OS put its loader on the ESP, register with the firmware and then allow the user to choose their boot OS/device by means of a firmware boot menu.
Re: GRUB
Date: 2013-01-24 09:54 am (UTC)So far, in practice, it seems like quite a lot of real-world UEFI implementations are making the UEFI boot manager menu quite inconvenient to access, unfortunately.
I'm not sure if Matt or anyone else has yet formed a definite opinion whether we should just be saying everyone should go through the UEFI boot manager, or trying to incorporate UEFI boot of other OSes into our own bootloader menus, with all the inevitable fun that would entail. I know for damn sure I haven't *tested* the latter approach much yet.
-adamw
My opinion
Date: 2013-01-24 05:10 am (UTC)Well, yes, I have had both these issue on my last installation of Fedora, too.
However, I rate this Linux distro as the best.
Ubuntu is pretty much just hype and plain thin-air.