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Comment by dlevine | Hacker News Reader

It seems like these changes have good intentions (i.e. improved security), but introduce a lot of complexity that can have unintended consequences for end-users. This reminds me somewhat of my process setting up UEFI Secure Boot on my Windows PC that wasn't originally configured for it. Not in the exact steps, but in that there is a ton going on behind the scenes and the UX is horrendously bad.

Unfortunately, vendors haven't really thought about how to explain these changes to end-users. They are trying to make them fairly transparent, which probably works at least 95% of the time, but for a small percentage of people, becomes a big PITA.

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I wanted to try out Windows 11 on my desktop, and one of the requirements was that UEFI secure boot is turned on. Took me the better part of a day to figure out how to turn it on, which required deleting some random partitions that had been created on my drive when I had upgraded from Windows 8 to Windows 10 because the tool to enable UEFI requires a _very specific_ number of partitions in the drive that it's being set up on. The error messages to figure out that was the problem were incredibly frustrating. The BIOS UI to turn it on was also so confusing; everything seems to be named differently in different places.

The kicker was that the Windows 11 install was borked and I had to wipe everything and reinstall. Ha.

something I found really handy for testing/retaining windows installs was a $30 external USB SSD (not a flash drive, a "external drive" that is flagged as "non-removable")

you can install windows directly on it and tell the UEFI to boot off of it with absolutely no fuss

How do I flag a drive as non removable?

This is from years back, but my experience is that running Windows from an external drive isn't really easy. I hardly use the OS any longer, but I'd like to keep it around on an external drive if possible.

I bought a disk that was already flagged!

apparently some USB flash drives have a bit you can toggle with some vendor specific tool, but I've not tried that

for a non-removable device installing Windows is exactly the same as for a normal hard drive (no fuss with Windows To Go or other rubbish)

Agreed. I don't think Apple is intending to be malevolent here, but this is pain for people like myself who value the ability to create bootable clones on external media. This has always been an area where the Mac excelled, but it looks like those days are over.

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