Samsung Sweden to Linux User: "UEFI BIOS Bug Not Our Problem"
Linux is a common operating system, not least in its Android version, and it is universally assumed that a PC (or whatever “IBM compatible” is called these days) will be able to run it. In fact, machines that can’t run Linux are extremely rare since aficionados keep porting the open-source operating system to even the most obscure and outdated machine families.
One of the PC makers who sell Linux compatible computers is Samsung. That is, almost all of their machines can run Linux, and when it was discovered last January that some recent laptops cannot, it was universally seen as a bug. Nobody designs a Linux-incompatible PC on purpose. It became big news, though I myself didn’t learn about it at the time. It was also soon discovered that a Linux boot is not the only way the bug can be triggered — Windows users are also at risk.
The problem is known as the Samsung UEFI BIOS bug. I won’t go into details I don’t understand: suffice to say that it has to do with the bootup sequence, where Samsung’s engineers have embraced the new UEFI technology without testing it sufficiently with Linux.
