Many developers believe creating apps for Windows on Arm is difficult, but developing for Arm is easier than you think, and Microsoft is here to help! It is my pleasure to announce a new App Assure Arm Advisory Service to help developers build Arm-optimized apps. This service is in addition to our existing promise: your apps will run on Windows on Arm, and if you encounter any issues, Microsoft will help you remediate them. Most apps just work under emulation, and developers can port their apps to run natively with minimal effort.
Anything to increase the adoption of ARM by Windows so that we finally get the ARM laptops Linux OEMs seem incapable or unwilling to make.
Don’t forget that Microsoft will insist that only Windows can boot on ARM laptops. So anyone thinking they can buy such a laptop and install Linux will be disappointed.
I must be imagining typing from this Thinkpad x13s then.
zayn@x13s ~> cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME=”Ubuntu 23.10″
NAME=”Ubuntu”
VERSION_ID=”23.10″
VERSION=”23.10 (Mantic Minotaur)”
VERSION_CODENAME=mantic
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL=”https://www.ubuntu.com/”
SUPPORT_URL=”https://help.ubuntu.com/”
BUG_REPORT_URL=”https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/”
PRIVACY_POLICY_URL=”https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-policy”
UBUNTU_CODENAME=mantic
LOGO=ubuntu-logo
zayn@x13s ~> sudo lshw -short
H/W path Device Class Description
=====================================================
system Lenovo ThinkPad X13s
/0 bus 21BXCTO1WW
/0/1 memory 384KiB L1 cache
/0/2 memory 384KiB L1 cache
/0/3 memory 1280KiB L2 cache
/0/4 memory 2MiB L3 cache
/0/5 processor ARM (428)
/0/6 memory 32GiB System Memory
/0/6/0 memory 32GiB TSOP LPDDR4 2092 MHz (0.5 ns)
/0/a memory 128KiB BIOS
Zayn,
Microsoft did officially restrict secure boot as JohnnyT777 mentioned starting with windows 8, but that was many years ago and I don’t know what the policy is today. Maybe someone can find a link to the current secure boot policy?
Anyway I am curious, are you able to check 1) whether you are able to rekey and disable secure boot on your ARM laptop? And 2) whether you are booting linux through microsoft’s key?
I’m not entirely comfortable with linux being dependent on microsoft’s graces, Many linux users end up running under microsoft’s secure boot keys even on x86.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UEFI/SecureBoot
Technically most x86 motherboards allow owners to disable secure boot, but I really don’t know if that’s the case for typical ARM hardware running windows, hence my questions above.
Incidentally I had an x86 fujitsu laptop where I could not disable secure boot. I could only run things signed by microsoft’s keys, but could not run my own. As you might imagine, I was frustrated because I did my research and dozens of users reported that linux worked on the hardware so I thought I was safe with secure boot restrictions. I made the faulty assumption that secure boot was unlocked. Now I know better, but this makes it much harder to research products because most users, linux users included, might not realize their hardware is locked.
Alfman,
Secure boot is a switch in the EFI setup screen. I’m booting with it switched off as I dual boot with OpenBSD too.
It’s a lovely little laptop and has been my daily driver for the last year, silent, cool, battery lasts forever and a day and it’s nice and fast too.
I can highly recommend it!
Zayn,
It doesn’t have the ports that I want, not even USB A, but then I’m not sure if I could find any ARM laptops that would cover my needs. Anyway, I don’t want to make this about my laptop requirements, I was just curious about secure boot restrictions and I’m very glad to hear that you can disable it. I hope this remains the norm going forward so that owners have the right to dual boot alternatives like you are doing.