Garrett: UEFI secure booting

In the clueless drooling-consumer market, hardware locked to Windows may gain a place in the market, just as phones locked to a particular network don't deter many sales. (If the word gets out that unlocking is *impossible* it may deter a few more, but there again, they buy Apple stuff! )

In the business arena, I think it will get the hardware onto a blacklist in many environments. The entire science and engineering faculty of any university, for example, wouldn't touch anything that couldn't run Linux by design with a bargepole. Probably the same for any commercial engineering R&D, any film studio, any bioscience facility.

Where I work, Dell has lost our (science faculty) business because we couldn't rely on them to supply hardware exactly as specified (and tested to work with Linux). Their attitude was that the wrong hardware was part of their "ongoing improvement process". It might have been for Windows users, but if it stopped us booting out pre-built Linux images, it meant their hardware was slightly less useful than a heap of rubble. So we found another supplier, where if we ordered a system with a particular tested and acceptable motherboard and graphics card, that's what we got - no substitutes except with explicit permission.