• 7 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 18th, 2023

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  • They didn’t care. You know non tech folk, they don’t care so long as it works. If you’re lucky, they know enough to hit the button with the power symbol to turn it on, but make sure you have step by step instructions printed out for those that can’t figure it out. I wish that was sarcasm.

    In our location it was mostly used for passive tracking of equipment via a scanner on the roof of the truck and tags on the trailers and we didn’t use the software much beyond that. From what I saw of it, it was some native custom application. Used the default Gnome interface and design scheme of the time. Looked to be pretty idiot proof.





  • That’s what I thought you might try. Answer is, I don’t know. I think it would depend on what the UEFI does with the secure boot keys when you disable secure boot. From a security standpoint it would make most sense for it to wipe those keys, but I could be wrong. The easiest way to find out if it would cause a problem would be to try it.

    If I understand this article correctly however, Windows only requires that the UEFI be capable of secure boot, not that secure boot be enabled.

    I think the first thing I would try is to try installing and booting Windows without secure boot. If that fails, than reinstall, this time with secure boot enabled and leave it enabled. Several other comments here are saying that secure boot in linux is now largely seamless and as it has been several years since I’ve mucked about with it, I’m inclined to listen to their recommendation.



  • The last time I had secure boot enabled on any of my systems was several years ago, but yes. At that time you had to enroll the keys both on the initial install and every update. It was such a headache for limited benefits (for me) that I just started disabling secure boot whenever I was setting up a system.

    Things might have gotten easier, but I doubt it as he secure boot system is not really under the control of open source developers (for good reason) and the end user can really only choose whether it is enabled or disabled.




  • With used hardware, it very much depends on what the hardware is and what you’re using it for. if you can find something from the last 10 years it’s probably worth it, but I wouldn’t get anything older than that. Power usage is the main concern, as systems have been plenty powerful enough for most applications for sometime. Hardware reliability would be another factor.

    When I was looking a couple of months ago, it looked like $200 USD was the sweet spot for used hardware, but at that price point, you could get one of those NUC knockoffs brand new, such as the Beelink N100. It just depends on what you need.