I have no serious position on whether Microsoft is currently enforcing secret deals to sabotage Linux, but I'm sure the employee assigned to respond to product reviews would not be given such inside information.

But there Linux should've booted, I was trying to change some energy saving settings.

So it might be that this is not a "by contract with Microsoft we locked down the Laptop to only boot Windows", but a "by contract with Microsoft we locked the Bios, which has the side effect of preventing booting Linux because the Kernel does not support yet a specific setting, which will change". Who knows.

It's still a bad policy, and even if it were an accident they have to fix it. They can not be allowed to prevent Linux from booting.

Of course Reddit has gone off without anyone actually confirming what the issue is. Microsoft would be smart to come out with a statement on this if it picks up any steam.

One user Bownairo confirmed that changing the drive to AHCI mode did fix the problem by allowing the drive to be recognized in Linux, after manually flashing a modded BIOS by soldering chip programming hardware:

https://imgur.com/a/ox4Ey

I wonder what it'll take to get Linux to see the drive in RAID mode.

djpohly and the BIOS hackers deserve some credit too for their REing:

https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-Request-Lenovo-Yoga-9...

Conditional flag locking users out of the Advanced settings page (with the RAID settings) of the BIOS, as shown in disassembled code:

https://lnv.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/76843...

Now, of course the rep might be mistaken. We need official clarification from someone higher up. But we won't get that until we go off on one and this goes viral.

> Thank you for confirming it is still not possible to install Linux on Yoga 900-13ISK2 systems.

> This issue has been escalated to the Development team. I am unable to offer a timeframe for fix at this stage in the investigation. With previous cases, BIOS fixes have been delivered anywhere from several weeks to several months.

> I will post again when I have more information on the investigation.

It is not up to the rest of the world to divine meaning from Lenovo's PR policy. If they are happy to allow nitwits to make public statements like that, they should be fully prepared to handle the fallout.

You have to go there to see it for yourself. Imagine the way that HN is paranoid of the US government, but then double that and apply it to Microsoft, which makes even less sense. To them, MS is the boogeyman that will stop at nothing to prevent them from being the glorious 1% that doesn't use Windows. It's still the 90's on /r/linux, in many many ways.

While OEMs try to spin crapware as a value add for the consumer, it's actually paid product placement. The OEMs make money off of installing crapware on your PC.

So, if the Signature Editions don't have crapware then that eats into the OEM's profit margins. What incentive do OEMs have to deploy the Signature Edition? Does Microsoft offer it at a lower cost? Do they pay OEMs to make Signature Editions?

It's entirely possible that if Microsoft is selling the Signature Edition for less or even paying OEMs to deploy it, then they might also make greater demands about system configurations and even ask that the devices be locked.

Microsoft requires Secure Boot on all Windows machines but only requires locked firmware on Mobile/RT devices. It's possible they could require locked firmware on Signature Editions as well.

The article is based on many sources, in the original forum thread on Lenovo forums there are many people who faced the problem with other models, some weren't even Lenovo but the problem with Lenovo is that the BIOS is locked completely, those people (using ASUS and Dell laptops) confirmed the problem is solved after the switch to AHCI from RAID.