Bonum Certa Men Certa

Sabotage, Not Negligence: It's 2015 and Microsoft Still Cannot Properly Handle Bootloaders

Manchester



Summary: Microsoft's aggression against GNU/Linux as witnessed in light of the company's multi-boot policies and handling

AT THE very end of July we noted (in several articles in fact) that Microsoft continues to attack dual-boot setups (meaning GNU/Linux). After all these years and despite having the manpower, Microsoft still claims to be incapable/unable to do what very few Linux hackers could do decades ago in order to facilitate OS co-existence. grub is maintained by very few people (almost none) and lilo is dying. As we noted here 4 days ago, "Microsoft's Vista 10 Still a Failure, So Focus Shifts to Attacks on GNU/Linux, Android". Below [1,2] there are some newest rants about dual-booting. Microsoft, now with the UEFI trap (some computers won't made 'secure boot' toggle-able with the introduction of future versions of Windows), continues to making life hard for GNU/Linux users. It's not a coincidence, it's intentional. Formal complaints were made as recently as 2 years ago to European authorities, which are too slow or apathetic to take action.



"Formal complaints were made as recently as 2 years ago to European authorities, which are too slow or apathetic to take action."Vista 10 reportedly gets some users banned from particular sites, notably torrent sites. It is not as though many people are affected because according to the most Microsoft-friendly data/surveys, Vista 10 has not even reached 5% market share. The market share share of Vista 10, based on the past week’s logs in Techrights, is 0.8%. This is not a success story considering the zero-cost 'upgrade' in the summer vacation months (when people have time to undertake this task). The market share share of Vista 10 based on the past week’s logs in Tux Machines is even lower (0.18%). Deterrence against exploration of GNU/Linux is now high on the agenda at Microsoft, as recent stories of ours served to demonstrate.

Related/contextual items from the news:

  1. Solution to freezing Ubiquity while attempting to dual-boot Ubuntu with Windows 10
  2. How to delete GRUB files from a Boot EFI partition in Windows 10




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