[lug] linux laptop search

[Michael J. Hammel]

One of things the thieves took this month was an old but very reliable
Acer Aspire 1691WLMi laptop.  I've had that thing about 8 years and was
considering replacing it but kept putting it off because it actually
worked just fine and I'm too lazy to deal with the new UEFI/Secure Boot
nonsense.  But now I have to deal with it.  

I know I can still buy motherboards that are not required to have that
stuff enabled or make it easy to disable.  But what about laptops?  My
understanding is that Windows 8 laptops are required to allow disabling
Secure Boot, thus allowing me to install any version of Linux I choose.
Is that a correct analysis?  

I have no interest in secure boot.  I just want a system I can do
whatever I want to without artificial impediments.  As I understand it,
the only part of UEFI that might prevent that is Secure Boot.  

So has anyone recently purchased a laptop and found it easy to disable
Secure Boot?  Is there anything I should look for that will help ensure
the laptop will allow me to install my favorite distro?

FYI - they didn't take my Acer C7 Chromebook, but I wish they had.  It's
junk.  And you can't easily disable the Secure Boot crap so you have to
hack an install over ChromeOS.  The only hack I've found so far is
ChrUbuntu, which forces me to use Ubuntu.  I hate it.  Networking is
pretty bad on that thing.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Principal Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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Since my last report, this employee has reached rock bottom.....and
has started to dig. -- From a real employee performance evaluation.