Apple Inc. is evil when it is about hardware, in past and present. I think that even for modern Apple hardware it is waste of time to attempt to run Linux/Haiku etc. on it. It is non-standard hardware with vendor-locks and a lot of restrictions.
Microsoft is more open to other operating systems on PCs. They also participate in developing open standards such as UEFI and ACPI.
Please read He Who Controls the Bootloader
It is a different issue. Microsoft do not make technical obstacles for running other OSes, but Apple do. Contract to not allow to sell PCs with Windows preinstalled if some other OS in installed is not a technical obstacle, but law and contract obstacle.
I disagree! Microsoft was the very reason BeOS could not enter the market and was instrumental in its demise. Microsoft has forced secure boot on PC OEMs, which makes it harder for other operating systems to be installed. So they’re still trying to control the boot loader to this very day!
Secure boot must have ability to be disabled according to spec. Also it is possible to install custom keys. So it is not a problem at all.
It’s a designed hurdle with bad intentions. You’re never going to convince me that Microsoft is one of the “good guys”.
While I really hate Micro$oft and believe they played a big role in making BeOS fail,I can’t agree that todays UEFI (which is M$ technology if I’m right) and its secure boot makes installing alternative OSes harder.
Nobody forces you to use secure boot,it’s only a switch in your BIOS/UEFI menu and it’s really easy to turn off.
In fact,that’s the first thing I do on every new computer.
If you already found out how to download a ISO,which one to use (is it x86,x64 or maybe aarch64?),how to burn it to an USB stick so that it’s bootable (dd, not cp) and how to select the boot device in the BIOS/UEFI,I’d say that turning of secure boot is the easiest step in that process.
Compared to non-x86 platforms that often require custom builds for every device,I find normal computers with UEFI still extremely open and flexible and that’s a good thing.
I think UEFI was invented by Intel.
But the secure boot aspect, it may be Microsoft.
You’re right,I just had a look at Wikipedia,it was originally developed by Intel and then continued by UEFI Forum which is a alliance of many companies.
M$ is part of the UEFI Forum,but didn’t invent it alone.
I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks Microsoft has too much sway.
This is about supporting Secure Boot.
I personally think that Secure Boot as such is absolute nonsense,even more so on an OS that doesn’t even have password protection,app permissions,hard disk encryption and probably a lot more.
Not that I’d want or need all of those features,but without those,it’s a lot easier to just boot Haiku and do damage there,rather than manipulating the bootloader or something like that.
Again,just open your BIOS/UEFI menu,switch Secure Boot off and be done with it.
It doesn’t make installing alternative OSes more difficult and it’s not something Haiku has to worry about yet.
Some PC OEMs make it hard to mess with such. I have heard folks who prefer to install and run something rant about it. I installed Haiku on a CHUWI box without issue, of course not all of the hardware was supported (audio and Wi-Fi in my case).
It is nothing compared to Apple evilness. For latest Apple ARM desktops/laptops it is impossible to run any 3rd-party OS without running MacOS first and it have non-standard boot loader and hardware description format. It seems also require online account in some cases.
I have Microsoft Surface tablet that run Haiku without problems because it use open standards (UEFI, ACPI, NVMe SSD, HDA audio, XHCI) and configurable secure boot. So even hardware literally from Microsoft is open to 3rd party OSes.
Apple always used proprietary hardware interfaces through its history and forced users to stay inside their ecosystem: Apple Talk, Apple Desktop Bus, Lightning etc…
I’m not here defending Apple, but you’re certainly defending the atrocities laid forth by Microsoft in its wake of destruction of anyone who may or have threatened their Windows monopoly.
At least one Surface model, refuses to boot Linux, no matter if secure boot is enabled or not. And yes, haiku boots on it, so I have the feeling they are not being fully UEFI compatible, if not directly cheating.
I have an experience where Linux do not boot, but Haiku boot fine on various hardware. So it may be a Linux fault.
You can test dozens of pen-drives with different Linux distros and different grub/kernel versions and the Surface silently ignores it. You can boot Linux from Windows reboot menu, and it works so it is crystal clear to me that this device is cheating by explicitly ignoring grub efi. I am not saying that Microsoft is pure evil or whatever but… from time to time they also spit on standards.
It is perfectly possible that GRUB use a lot of hacks and do not obey UEFI spec. And GRUB is not needed at all to boot Linux on UEFI platform.
Grub is the way for booting from a pendrive in a secure boot environment, because already brings a Microsoft signature.
Those devices are known to be Linux unfriendly due to rare hardware choices.
On HP computers I had problems booting from USB sticks until I marked one partition as active. They do that so the machine boots normally (to the hard disk) when you have a non-bootable usb drive connected.
I would suspect that Microsoft attempted something similar: they know that their users will get very confused and angry if the machine doesn’t boot as expected when an USB drive is connected. Maybe they are a bit too strict in their definition of what a bootable USB key is, but the initial requirement was certainly “let’s makt it super hard to install Linux because we’re evil”. It’s more “we have to fix this specific problem, and unfortunately, Linux support (which we are not getting paid to work on anyways) is going to be degraded because of it”. So, it’s just negligence: they don’t care about Linux because no one asked them to.
Unfortunately, negligence may be harder to fight, because, strictly speaking, no one did their job wrong. Everyone involved solved the problems they were asked to solve, and did not spend extra time on unneeded tasks. Maybe they don’t even know that there is a problem, and so there will be no plans to solve it.