“Something has gone seriously wrong,” dual-boot systems warn after Microsoft update

Well... It's the opposite... People affected by this issue could not boot Linux...

Ahem

The update was meant to fix a situation where an attacker would somehow get grub onto a machine that was SINGLE booting windows and use grub to tamper with secureboot. this fix was meant to only apply in single boot situations where it should be entirely unexpected to see grub. as they said, something went seriously wrong.

Ehhh i that's likely enough, but Microsoft is also just shit at fixing things

So all afected people were potential targets?

It is fine if you only accept signatures from yourself. However, that's a lot of work as you need to sign everything.

It was a Windows vulnerability that allowed an exploit box GRUB

Whaaaat, you're having a good experience with teams in Firefox? I've run into all kinds of problems with teams under Firefox in linux, particularly with codecs and not being able to receive video. It works better under edge in linux, but unsurprisingly, the best teams experience is under the native client in Windows.

Microsoft fired its entire QA team 10 years ago, and shifted the responsibility for testing onto developers. They also got rid of their dedicated hardware lab where software would be tested on many different hardware combinations.

I have worked in two companies that made the same move of firing QA, and in both the quality of the released software took a marked dive. (In neither company did senior management admit that what everyone warned them would be a mistake was a mistake. Instead they blamed developers.)

These days Microsoft's testing team is whichever users receive each update first. They rely on users and telemetry to do what should be the job of dedicated testers.

I got around that by having two EFI partitions, grub linux partition is loaded always at boot and it chainloads to the Windows EFI boot partition if I choose Windows. Windows does not know another partiton exists.

I have two pieces of software I cannot live without, to the point that I would rewrite them for Linux if it came to that. Running Windows as a VM using Virtual Box has been a nice experience so far. (Given that both software are not CPU nor GPU heavy and could run on a tree if need be.)

And each time you want to use Windows, you have to go through hoops and updates of Windows and then updates of the applications (and possibly games) to just do the work you intended to boot into. I had Windows for a few years in dual mode too and know the problems of a Windows system that is not used often.

If you really need some applications, then consider using a VM (however doesn't solve the updates and usability issue of Windows). Off course some games won't work, but if its not a game then maybe you can finally get rid of your dual boot.

I'm not sure I follow that analogy, if you get a ride to a hospital you don't expect it to lock off all other destinations. What happens in the hospital is irrelevant.

From reading the article, this is more like if you walk into a hotel and they burn down your house so you have no choice but to stay. I suppose in theory you could argue in very bad faith that this is a problem with the house since it's the house that burned, but in reality the problem is the fact they're the ones who started the fire.

Because people cannot block darn windows updates. Its a real malware only allowed by law

Does that screenwriting software require a lot of performance? You might opt to install Windows into a virtual machine, as described here: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-setup-windows-10-virtual-machine-linux

Essentially you're using some software to emulate a computer inside your computer that can run any operating system you want. It doesn't need to touch your actual operating system installation, you can treat it as just another program. For your use case that sounds appropriate; you occasionally need to run specific software that has low system requirements. This way you can do that without risking Microsoft borking your Linux machine any time it feels like it.

When I was still dual-booting Windows and Linux, I found that "raw disk" mode virtual machines worked wonders. I used VirtualBox, so you'd want a guide somewhat like this: https://superuser.com/questions/495025/use-physical-harddisk-in-virtual-box - other VM solutions are available, which don't require you to accept an agreement with Oracle.

Essentially, rather than setting aside a file on disk as your VM's disk, you can set aside a whole existing disk. That can be a disk that already has Windows installed on it, it doesn't erase what you have. Then you can start Windows in a VM and let it do its updates - since it can't see the bootloader from within the VM, it can't fuck it up. You can run any software that doesn't have particularly high graphics requirement, too.

I was also able to just "restart in Windows" if I wanted full performance for a game or something like that, but since Linux has gotten very good indeed at running games, that became less and less necessary until one day I just erased my Windows partition to recover the space.

However bad that sounds, you're probably best off disabling all updates in windows. O&O shutup10 has a setting for that. Download it to a pendrive with Linux, and boot windows with network unplugged.

Does your device have 16gb of ram? If so install Windows in Virtual manager with the guest addons. It will allow copy and paste along with lots of other features while keeping Windows in its own area.

Do you know which bootloader you have? There are two popular ones in use currently, one called systemd boot, the other is called grub. From reading this post only grub seems to be affected. I don't really know which one fedora defaults to at the moment, and it likely depends on what happened during the installation process as well.

What do you use? Maybe there is a Linux alternative to that so you don't have to bother with a VM.

Out of curiosity, have you tried Fade In?

Can you install windows in a VM instead? VirtualBox is easy to set up.

Which screenwriting software? Have you tried running it under WINE?

And do you HAVE to use that one in particular? Or can you use something like Trelby, Manuskript, or Scrite?

Windows into a VM

I thought the whole point of the Quest is that it’s a standalone device that runs games untethered?

Is this instead of grub, or in adding to?

I was gonna say, I don’t like to victim blame but why would people be grubbing around these days to begin with?