> > Major distributions have worked around this issue by purchasing a signing key from Microsoft for their binary packages, but the end user is unable to modify the signed software without a license from Microsoft, even though they have the source code available to them under the GPL.

> Is this an accurate description of what is happening? (I don't pay much attention to desktop systems: I spend most of my time concentrating on the ever-worsening mobile arena.) Do these "major distributions" come with a recent version of bash? As someone who develops software under the GPLv3 license, I would not want my software being distributed to these machines via this hack :/.

It's not entirely accurate. Effectively what most modern distributions do is that they have a "shim" which is signed by Microsoft. That shim then enrols the distribution's own UEFI keys on the laptop. So their kernel is signed with both their own key and Microsoft's key. This means that you can modify your code without "permission" from Microsoft. openSUSE, Fedora and Debian all employ this tactic so that our distributions can boot on newer laptops.

Do I wish this wasn't necessary and that everything ran core boot? Yes. Is there a better way of handling this problem? Not as far as I know.