http://arstechnica.com/business/new...ecure-boot-will-complicate-linux-installs.ars Doesn't sound like a huge problem but then I don't run Linux either so I couldn't really say. Thought I would pop a heads up for those that do though.
Windows always "complicates" Linux installs though. It seems like every new versions of Windows does this :/
^^^^ Seriously. This doesnt really have any purpose that I can see other than causing problems with Linux and possibly Mac. It will also complicate advanced Windows users who want to install a tweaked driver for something, or install a somewhat obscure piece of hardware that the company doesnt provide signed drivers for. Win7 "required" signed drivers but you could disable that "feature". But with the Win8 client requiring secure boot to be on I dont think you will be able to turn off the signed driver check. Im sure there are supposedly valid security reasons for this, but it just seems unnecessary and complicated and will hurt far more people than it has the potential to help.
I think people are reading too much into this. UEFI isn't a solely Microsoft initiative: "The board of directors includes representatives from eleven "Promoter" companies: AMD, American Megatrends, Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Insyde Software, Intel, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Phoenix Technologies." (courtesy of Wikipedia, yeah I know but they're unlikely to get that wrong) What is is the requirement for support of signed bootloaders for certification. It's true that things like that can prevent build-it-yourself bootloaders from working, but that's why you should have the option to turn it off. UEFI "BIOS" vendors will likely provide this for any particularly general-purpose machine since corporations are likely going to need it to run legacy operating systems or parts of the *nix world (that said, since a lot of servers run RHEL et al anyway, it might not even be a roadblock...). Where there might not be such a great incentive to provide a way to disable the feature (not that it is overly hard to turn things off...) is for consumer-oriented devices like slates. You might have to be careful with these. As stated in the article, it blocks a growing and important class of malware, which means you are less likely to get your information stolen. I would also point out that it's not likely to interfere with Mac, since Apple makes their own machines, gets to control what's in them, and there's really nothing stopping them from getting their own OS/boot-loader signed. They're not a garage outfit. It probably would screw with "Hackintoshes", if you weren't careful enough to pick a motherboard with a BIOS that can turn secure boot off, but something tells me Apple would be happy about that. Honestly, since Linux isn't going away, and there is a sector of the IT industry with quite a bit of money that does actually care about it, I don't think there's too much to worry about here... and characterising it as Microsoft vs. Linux amounts to a conspiracy theory, nothing more. P.S. As far as I can tell, driver signing is enforced at the group policy level, not by the boot loader.