[ubuntu-uk] efi boot, Windows 8 and Linux

[Gordon Burgess-Parker]

On 22/09/2011 22:31, paul sutton wrote:
> Well there seems to be a market for PC's minus an OS now,

I suppose it all depends on what your target "market" is. It would be 
interesting to find out the ratio of computers (and by that term I mean 
both laptops and desktops) used in business to that of home non-business 
use.
Certainly in large corporations the process tends to be "buy whatever 
machines we need and we'll image them with our own volume-licensed 
disks". In that case I suspect that any EFI restrictions won't matter 
because what they image them with will comply with the EFI requirements 
purely for the sake of speed and ease of imaging. (For example my wife 
received a new laptop last year that had Windows 7 stickers on it yet 
was imaged by the company with XP). If the numbers of machine in use in 
corporate settings (and I know that certainly the vast majority of MS 
Office installations are in corporate settings so it would be logical to 
assume the same for machines)  is a lot greater than than those in homes 
then I suspect that the major OEM vendors aren't going to bother (in 
terms of ROI) to make any sort of significant numbers of machines with 
no OS.
That again leaves us in a no win situation because only the 
knowledgeable, the "hobbyists" and converted are going to bother to 
search out a bare-bones machine to install their own OS on.
Again - what actually happens will be driven in the main by the largest 
group of users, and I suspect that is the Corporate sector...
Now whether Windows 8 will even be a factor in this I don't know. 
Certainly AFAIK (as above) many large corporations have not yet upgraded 
to Windows 7, even though it's been out for nearly two years now and XP 
comes out of support in 30 months....