I agree with you that disabling SecureBoot *should* be unnecessary. I also agree that the five steps you outline *should* work, although I disagree they are a 'sure-fire way'. But not having access to this laptop model, nor indeed having ever personally bypassed win8 yet (I specifically bought a Clevo with no OS for that reason... amongst others), I'm forced to rely on what other folks that *have* attempted such things claim. Have you tried the steps on that laptop? Folks basically claim you're wrong, at least for this Samsung model, on which hold-shift does not work for non-msft-OSes, but a workaround is to disable SecureBoot (and twirl a chicken).
Tony says: ...neither of them works or has any effect at all. You put in your usb, and it is just totally ignored. TOTALLY IGNORED!!!!! As I say, if you read the article I have recommended, you will see that this is intentional on microsoft's part, unless your software has a recognised cryptographic signature from microsoft... regarding the 'official' (but actually USELESS) method ...press Shift while pressing the RESTART button, NOT the shut down button.... #2) Use a Device... we then get a new screen... Icon 1&2 - UEFI: IP4&IP6 Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller [and nothing else -- no bootable usb or bootable dvd shown -- just the PXE-or-somesuch gigabit ethernet chipset is available besides the main hdd] ... it just dont' frigging work!!! ... I have spent days trying to sort it out and get it working, but to no avail.
The person before him (Ioan) was able to install win7 on the laptop model in question, via the hold-shift-in-win8-when-you-click-restart procedure. Not sure whether from dvd or from usb, but win7 is also a microsoft OS, so methinks that is not a fair test. (Question: when you have a SecureBoot-enabled machine with Win8, and you attempt to boot from a Win7 dvd, does the SecureBoot infrastructure recognize your DVD *because* it is a msft-digisigned OS, or does the hold-shift-in-win8 procedure temporarily disable SecureBoot, or what?)
The people that commented further down in the thread, like R.Moss who I believe actually installed a non-microsoft OS, claimed they had to go through the quad-reboot quad-unset dance mentioned above, including disabling SecureBoot. I don't have the machine, so I cannot verify one way or the other. Maybe they were wrong, and simply hold-shift-in-win8-when-you-click-restart would have worked, too.
But the hold-shift procedure very clearly did *not* work for Tony... we can speculate on the underlying reason for this. Maybe he never plugged in his bootable USB, while still in win8, before holding shift? Maybe his bootable USB was not correctly burned, and not marked as bootable? Maybe the firmware bug, that this model refused to boot from a usb3 port, is what got him? (He had returned it to amazon by the time somebody mentioned this bug.) Note that Tony is a programmer (of unspecified sort). He knows about hdd partitions. He already knew how to boot from usb/cd, and burn usbkeys/cds, and install Linux. On older BIOS-based non-GPT non-UEFI non-SecureBoot boxen, that is! He also has the entire internet at his disposal, including your own github repo (which he admitted was totally over his head... but he *did* look at it during his days of effort, which is more than some hypothetical Aunt Tillie would have done).
Re: SecureBoot setting, versus SecureBoot philosophy
Tony says: ...neither of them works or has any effect at all. You put in your usb, and it is just totally ignored. TOTALLY IGNORED!!!!! As I say, if you read the article I have recommended, you will see that this is intentional on microsoft's part, unless your software has a recognised cryptographic signature from microsoft... regarding the 'official' (but actually USELESS) method ...press Shift while pressing the RESTART button, NOT the shut down button.... #2) Use a Device... we then get a new screen... Icon 1&2 - UEFI: IP4&IP6 Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller [and nothing else -- no bootable usb or bootable dvd shown -- just the PXE-or-somesuch gigabit ethernet chipset is available besides the main hdd] ... it just dont' frigging work!!! ... I have spent days trying to sort it out and get it working, but to no avail.
The person before him (Ioan) was able to install win7 on the laptop model in question, via the hold-shift-in-win8-when-you-click-restart procedure. Not sure whether from dvd or from usb, but win7 is also a microsoft OS, so methinks that is not a fair test. (Question: when you have a SecureBoot-enabled machine with Win8, and you attempt to boot from a Win7 dvd, does the SecureBoot infrastructure recognize your DVD *because* it is a msft-digisigned OS, or does the hold-shift-in-win8 procedure temporarily disable SecureBoot, or what?)
The people that commented further down in the thread, like R.Moss who I believe actually installed a non-microsoft OS, claimed they had to go through the quad-reboot quad-unset dance mentioned above, including disabling SecureBoot. I don't have the machine, so I cannot verify one way or the other. Maybe they were wrong, and simply hold-shift-in-win8-when-you-click-restart would have worked, too.
But the hold-shift procedure very clearly did *not* work for Tony... we can speculate on the underlying reason for this. Maybe he never plugged in his bootable USB, while still in win8, before holding shift? Maybe his bootable USB was not correctly burned, and not marked as bootable? Maybe the firmware bug, that this model refused to boot from a usb3 port, is what got him? (He had returned it to amazon by the time somebody mentioned this bug.) Note that Tony is a programmer (of unspecified sort). He knows about hdd partitions. He already knew how to boot from usb/cd, and burn usbkeys/cds, and install Linux. On older BIOS-based non-GPT non-UEFI non-SecureBoot boxen, that is! He also has the entire internet at his disposal, including your own github repo (which he admitted was totally over his head... but he *did* look at it during his days of effort, which is more than some hypothetical Aunt Tillie would have done).