So they were trying to patch systems that use GRUB for Windows-only installs? What a load of BS. Why would anybody install GRUB to boot only Windows with that? Or am I overlooking something?
Furthermore, if GRUB has a security issue, they should’ve contributed a patch at the source instead of patching it themselves somehow. I’m a bit stunned at the audacity of touching unmounted filesystems in an OS patch. Good thing Windows still doesn’t include EXT4 and BTRFS drivers because they might start messing with unencrypted Linux system drives at this rate
I agree they should have sent a patch to the grub source, but keep in mind big software companies like microsoft, Verizon, … do not normally allow their product teams to send a patch or PR to open source projects. This is because in their contract it states that all code written on and during company times is owned by the company. This means that it is impossible for them to make a patch or PR because it would conflict with the projects licence and fact its open source.
This changes when the team explicitly works on the foss product/project like the ms wsl team or the team working on linux supporting azure hardware, but that is an exception. I do not believe the microsoft kernel/bootloader team is allowed to send patches to grub.Its a terrible thing, and it shouldnt be, but thats the fact of the world atm.
What? Microsoft have written and released and contributed to many open source projects - they created vscode for one. They are even one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel.
Well, you can just fix the bootloader, but that’s not super exciting I guess.
People who dual boot are likely to be linux newbies just trying it out. They’re more likely to blame linux when microsoft does what it does to competitors.
That’s not necessarily true, I dual boot and I’ve been using Linux for my main OS for about 15 years now. I rarely use mine but it is useful/needed occasionally.
Doesn’t Windows break dual booting semi-regularly? I’ve always avoided it as I’ve had friends get burned by this in the past. I guess I just keep different OSes on different drives, but that obviously isn’t feasible for everyone.
