ITWire still has problems with basic accuracy

[mjg59]

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.

Comments

Isn't this defamation?

[(Anonymous)]

Couldn't you (or the body that represents Fedora) just sue? ITWire and so many other "professional" tech blogs rely on sexy headlines to bait links. Teach them that doing this unfaithfully will cost them.

IYWire write up on Fedora 18

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it could be that ITWire is just a front
for Microsoft. Something like "paid journalism". They will jump up and down on
non-issues, just to enhance the cause of their
backers.

From bad journalism to malicious

[(Anonymous)]

This is just one of the many instances of Sam Varghese being a charlatan. He has been doing this for years. This is completely unexceptable for a journalist. It is time to add him to the official list:

http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/

~Matt Jones

GRUB

[(Anonymous)]

Regarding the second issue mentioned by the author, isn't this actually expected behaviour?

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.

My opinion

[(Anonymous)]

"[...] 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 [...]"

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.