Factually wrong.
Any regular PC owner can run Linux on modern x86 hardware in at least three ways:
- Legacy BIOS MBR boot
- UEFI boot
- UEFI secure boot
Only the last one of those three options requires a signed shim, and only if you don’t enrol your own keys.
> Microsoft signed the Red Hat shim, and if you disabled Secure Boot, it's only because a Microsoft policy gave you the ability to disable it -- a policy they can later reverse.
This FUS has been repeated the last 10 years+ and it gets less convincing every year.
No OEM or PC vendor wants to limit their amount of potential in what is already a cut-margin business.
Taking away the ability to disable secure boot or taking away the legacy BIOS boot option will only cost them customers, and they literally have nothing to gain.
I definitely recall Microsoft killing hardware manufacturers putting Linux on the machines that they sold by mandating that if they put Linux on any consumer desktop they would not get the OEM discount for a Windows licence for any computer they sold. It stopped new non Windows PC sales dead at the time IIRC. This was something like over a decade ago.
Operating systems with "signed binaries or GTFO" policies are not really protecting the user. Any protection the user receives is a secondary concern to the fact that the OS vendor wants to control what the user runs on the device.
Microsoft.
Remember, you run Linux on modern hardware only because Microsoft allows you to. Microsoft signed the Red Hat shim, and if you disabled Secure Boot, it's only because a Microsoft policy gave you the ability to disable it -- a policy they can later reverse.