Good intention, shit execution.
If Microsoft didn’t have a decades-long record of pulling shit like this, they might get the benefit of the doubt.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
I hate this phrase.
A lot of the time, people (and especially monopolistic, tax-dodging, $3.2 trillion multinationals with a long history of anti-competitive behaviour) really are just cunts.
Time and time again, we see big companies doing anything they can to destroy competition, mislead customers, etc.
Never attribute to stupidity what can be adequately explained by malice.
Well, you can just fix the bootloader, but that’s not super exciting I guess.
People who dual boot are likely to be linux newbies just trying it out. They’re more likely to blame linux when microsoft does what it does to competitors.
That’s not necessarily true, I dual boot and I’ve been using Linux for my main OS for about 15 years now. I rarely use mine but it is useful/needed occasionally.
I blame Linux distributions for not updating when the issue has been fixed for years a little more than I blame Microsoft for untrusting old vulnerable software versions. That said, failing to figure out if it is dual booting or not when there are multiple ways of doing it was not really a surprise.
(I also remember when some Fedora ISOs were unbootable immediately after release a few years ago for similar issues, they hadn’t updated shim or similar)
I dual boot and am maybe considered a newbie. But I’ve had this set up for about a year slowly preparing to stop using Microsoft crap. It’s part of a longer path to digital privacy that was kicked into gear when the win 11 update made my Wi-Fi card disappear, like gone- like it was never installed. Fuck HP and Microsoft
Ironically I had disabled secure boot to try another distro. Was going to drop Ubuntu for something else, still might but no rush, plenty to learn.
As a noob myself I can suggest KDE Neon. It’s quite similar to Windows. I switched 2 of my machines over and when the security updates stop for Windows 10 my gaming machine will switch also. I’m very satisfied 6 months in.
It’s not just about privacy. Linux and open source communities are a safespace for a novel way of doing things.
Remove your Microsoft installation, done.
Yes but…
But what? This is Microsoft, they fucked it up so many times that it’s either incompetence or sabotage, and knowing Microsoft, it’s probably both.
This is the same company that invented millions to sabotage Linux through the legal system (hello sco), and the same company that in purpose left gaping security holes open as to not lose any money, causing China to hack the US government through said holes.
Then we decide that just that money isn’t enough so we’ll spy on you at every step of the way, we will force feed you ads, and we’ll use you to train our shitty AI
Frack Microsoft, frack any and all of their software.
This is a regular occurrence and honestly we need to stop recommending dual boot. Use separate drives if you need to, but sharing the same drive is destined to brick something
But having 2 drives does not solve the boot loading issue, I mean, even if you have two drives, you still have only one bootloader, not?
even if you have two drives, you still have only one bootloader, not?
The idea is to have completely separate boot and OS drives. You select which one you want to boot through the BIOS boot selection (ie. pressing F10 or F11 at the BIOS screen).
This functionally makes each OS “unaware” of the other one.
Oh you sweet sweet summer boy…
We’re talking Microsoft here, they’ll make sure they’re aware and they’ll make sure to f you over because Microsoft
Unfortunately it really doesn’t. And it’s actually Linux that’s the bigger problem: whenever it decides to updates GRUB it looks for OSes on all of your drives to make grub entries for them. It also doesn’t necessarily modify the version of grub on the booted drive.
Yes I’m sure there’s a way to manually configure everything perfectly but my goal is a setup where I don’t have to constantly manually fix things.
No. You can have more than one EFI system partition with separate bootloaders on each drive and set their boot order in the BIOS, just like booting from USB or anything else.
This is also possible with just one drive. The efi boot entries for each OS are stored separately in the efi system partition.
EFI can also live in firmware memory.
You can pull the linux drive, boot from the windows drive, and if one of the firmware updates was for efi, windows will trash the entry for your Linux disk.
This has happened for me many times, I had to use a grub rescue disk to rebuild the efi table.
You can have a own EFI partition per Drive (and on it whatever bootloader you want). You then need to use the UEFI boot menu if you want e.g. boot the Windows one. If you have 2 different OS on different drives they should never interfere with each other.
Well, i mean you could of course use the Linux Bootmanager to then forward to the Windows boot manager on the other disk. but i never experimented with that.
I don’t think dual boot has ever been a good solution (unless you also run one or both of the OS’s under the other in a VM).
Like, if you are unsure about linux, trying it out, learning, whatever, you can just boot a live"cd", or maybe install it on an external (flash) drive.
If you are kinda sure you want to switch, just nuke Windows; it’s easier to switch that way than to have everything on two systems, having to switch.
That is until you want to switch and use mostly linux, but you have friends who want to play one of those few games that only works on windows
The second windows isnt the only option for “all games without any effort”, it will be dead.
I literally got this error using a bootable SSD with Ubuntu Mate on it. Separate drives aren’t immune to the issue.
I think I’ve managed to avoid this by making the Linux drive my boot drive and by leaving the Windows drive untouched. (i.e. grub bootloader on the Linux drive, with option to boot to Windows as the second choice)
So they were trying to patch systems that use GRUB for Windows-only installs? What a load of BS. Why would anybody install GRUB to boot only Windows with that? Or am I overlooking something?
Furthermore, if GRUB has a security issue, they should’ve contributed a patch at the source instead of patching it themselves somehow. I’m a bit stunned at the audacity of touching unmounted filesystems in an OS patch. Good thing Windows still doesn’t include EXT4 and BTRFS drivers because they might start messing with unencrypted Linux system drives at this rate
I agree they should have sent a patch to the grub source, but keep in mind big software companies like microsoft, Verizon, … do not normally allow their product teams to send a patch or PR to open source projects. This is because in their contract it states that all code written on and during company times is owned by the company. This means that it is impossible for them to make a patch or PR because it would conflict with the projects licence and fact its open source.
This changes when the team explicitly works on the foss product/project like the ms wsl team or the team working on linux supporting azure hardware, but that is an exception. I do not believe the microsoft kernel/bootloader team is allowed to send patches to grub.
Its a terrible thing, and it shouldnt be, but thats the fact of the world atm.
What? Microsoft have written and released and contributed to many open source projects - they created vscode for one. They are even one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel.
Yes, but not all devs within microsoft are allowed to work on non-ms foss projects. I assume wsl devs are allowed to send stuff to linux but visual studio devs probably are not.
This means that it is impossible for them to make a patch or PR because it would conflict with the projects licence and fact its open source.
That’s not how it works. It just means the company owns the code for all intents and purposes, which also means that if they tell you that you can release it under a FOSS license / contribute to someone else’s project, you can absolutely do that (they effectively grant you the license to use “their” code that you wrote under a FOSS license somewhere else).
Not true. A lot of commonly known closed source companies contribute to open source software, including Linux and BSD
And not every team is allowed to do that.
Also, youre telling somebody who has worked with big companies not allowing it in their employer contract that he is lying? Riiiight…
A lot of google devs also are not allowed to do any linux work outside of work without explicit permissions because of all the internal docs, teams and other work being done on linux from within google. Development rights is an absolute mess, legally.
I usually dont care and do what is right, despite what my emploter contract says, but i have gotten in trouble for it
What is that latter fallback called? I set up my boot manually using an EFI stub last time I installed arch but wasn’t aware of any fallback bootloader
