Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.

UEFI is Trash: Part 2 “Destroy the Computer to Continue Using Windows 11!”

This is a follow-up to my last post about System76 getting rid of UEFI and putting in Coreboot for their laptops.

UEFI is a security disaster.

Lenovo has patched my UEFI over 30 times and there are still releases like this month’s.

Modified:
1.  Enhancement to address security vulnerability CVE-2022-44611, CVE-2023-22616, CVE-2023-22615, CVE-2023-22612, CVE-2021-38578,
                                                  CVE-2022-24350, CVE-2023-22613, CVE-2021-38575
2.  Enhancement to address security vulnerability CVE-2022-46897, CVE-2023-27373, CVE-2023-26090, CVE-2023-27471, CVE-2022-24351,
                                                  CVE-2023-0286, CVE-2022-4304, CVE-2023-0215, CVE-2022-4450, CVE-2023-28468
3.  Enhancement to address security vulnerability CVE-2022-40982
4.  Enhancement to address security vulnerability CVE-2022-36392, CVE-2022-38102, CVE-2022-29871

-Lenovo

That’s TWENTY-TWO security vulnerabilities with a CVE that they’ve patched in one update (out of over thirty since this laptop was released in November 2020).

They’ve all been about like this.

“Security Expert” Matthew Garrett shows up to many debates about firmware, talking UEFI up as if it were possible to secure, if they even knew what they were doing with it.

Which they obviously, demonstrably, do not.

The recent Windows 11 “Unsupported Processor” error, had Microsoft say they were “working with OEMs” to provide “firmware updates”.

You’d need Windows to install the update, and Windows is already hosed if you got the update this month (you are making backups, right?), because it caused the system to Blue Screen of Death before the desktop is available to run any programs.

And even if you do install UEFI updates, which most users do not ever do, even once, you run the risk of bricking the entire computer to get Windows to behave itself enough to even do anything after you install the August Update.

(That’s if it doesn’t install the August Update and try to reboot itself while you’re trying to update the firmware. Does it still do things like this? Windows 10 was forcibly restarting for updates while people were live streaming games and had Microsoft Office open.)

Every time you update your firmware, any one of a million things can go wrong and leave the computer’s main board (which in a laptop has the CPU, RAM, and SSD soldered in sometimes, so kiss everything goodbye) utterly ruined.

That could be a Windows program (or virus) messing up the update process, Windows itself malfunctioning and freezing the computer before the update goes all the way in, the power going out, etc.

Of course you’re going to play Russian Roulette with your Lenovo laptop three dozen times, right? Right?

And even if it appears to update the UEFI, I have actually lost a motherboard (from Acer) while updating the correct firmware revision, and then had Acer refuse to do anything about it, so I had to find another motherboard that fit the case, and rebuild the entire desktop computer. (Which I’m sure all of you know how to do.)

So if you’re affected by Windows refusing to let you continue until you update the UEFI, it’s safer to just remove Windows and install Linux instead, because Linux doesn’t have fake errors like this.

It’s also worth mentioning that when I started tinkering with Windows 98 as a child and gutting the operating system of Internet Explorer, the Trident engine, the Windows 98 Shell Update (installing the Windows 95 B Shell), Outlook Express, and the several dozen useless components of Windows, using RoM II, I rebooted.

I said, “This is cool! Without all that Internet Explorer junk around, my games run 10% faster!”.

It was like a free graphics card, RAM, CPU, and hard disk update!

Even back then things were, relatively speaking, as bad as they are now, with the bloat.

You had a 4 GB hard disk and here comes Microsoft to spew at least 300 MB of useless trash all over it, you had a PC that came from the factory with 32 MB of RAM, or 64 if you were lucky, uh oh, here’s a bloated shell with IE stuff in it that takes up 11 MB more than it should!

They’ve always considered everything in your PC pretty much theirs to waste. You have an expensive PC? They’re wasting it on things you don’t even want to run.

But today, 25 years later, I say, “Let’s remove all this Windows junk so my games can go wheeeeeeee!”.

But for the adult in you, the average Linux distribution includes tons of Free and Open Source Software (as in freedom and price), including an entire Microsoft-compatible office suite that doesn’t go into “read-only” mode if your subscription to “Microsoft 365” lapses, saying “Pay Up, Chump!”.

Windows 11 treats its users like they’re running some kind of awful browser game with in-app purchases.

It’s not even really an operating system.

And you’re supposed to risk damaging a $1,500 laptop to continue running it because Microsoft is too incompetent to fix bugs? ⬆