You never wondered why the 8.2 SP was "delayed" and then cancelled, all to pander to the ridiculous "public beta involvement" propaganda phase of Win10? I don't care about OS "features" which have nothing to do with actual OS architectures, once you scrape away the superficial nonsense they sell to the public, it's just 8.2 with another name. This time, they simply didn't bother to beat the dead horse in public, and so appealed to the public to actually beat it
for them. A remarkable feat of social engineering, really, but what else is to be expected of an internet-generation who always buy into the shiny and the free?
And I agree, Linux would not have a better standing
now without secureboot - but I'm not talking about the contemporary, I'm talking about how in the future (except for the few Linux flavours who pander to include the MS license) there will be no way for regular users to even
try it, never mind adopt it. Like I said, such pernicious UEFI "features" can be bypassed now quite easily, but they will not be tomorrow. And if a user is
physically prevented from dual-booting, that's the ballgame, as they say.
Don't take the hardware freedoms you have today for granted; they are being stripped from future-architectures at this very moment, and that's inarguable (unless you just happen to know how to write and inject your own BIOS handoffs - but I imagine few can).
One could argue that outside of the developer-circle, the desktop paradigm for OS's (of any description) is dead, so comparing them becomes somewhat moot, since the development platform is abstracted away from the common-user on purpose. And, for simplicity, when I say "Linux" I mean that in the widest sense, as in Low-fat Unix, which includes the negligible share of Apple, as well. By suggesting a duality, I do not propose the dominance of any two
current systems, but the larger sphere of paid-vs-beer. In that sense it's hardly irrational propaganda, its the much simpler game of "wait and see". Beer always gets the loudest cheers, but paid-for is more oft left standing at the end of the day. There is nothing propagandistic about history - except, of course, history itself from the perspective of the young.