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I bought a Packard bell EasyNote TE69KB series after I had checked that I could turn off Uefi secure boot in the shop. Naturally this lap came with Windows 8 so I wanted to make a backup of it before I install Linux. That turrned out to be quite a project. Basically the OEM makes an image on the hdd and from there you can copy that 16 Gig image over to a USB and maybe get it to install from there later. Since I have no plans of using Windows 8, I simply dropped the backup.

Before removing it I took the time to check out Windows 8:

I had no idea that it was that bad! Honestly it is almost incredible that Microsoft alters everything like that. It is messy you wont be able to "go back" IE is integrated in a horrible way and Windows 8 has a lot of key shortcuts now - because the mouse does not work.

Since this Packard laptop has no touch screen - I can assure you that Windows 8 is the worst OS I have ever seen at least on this box.

Windows 8 is simply a chaos - and unbelivably bad. Microsoft really needed to make it impossible to hard to install Linux - because without that exclusion this would be the biggest boost for Linux - ever !

Anyway packard does not allow me to keep Uefi and turn off secure boot. With Uefi the lap did not detect any live CD and went straight for Win 8.
I can turn off Uefi alltogether and opt for legacy boot in the Bios (F2) and that is good enough since this lap has no huge disks.

I tried to reduce the Windows partition and leave Windows 8 in there, but that only left me with a lot of space hassle so i deleted the entire Windows enchilada and reserved the space for Linux.

Manjaro's Live CD did not run properly and kept bouncing back to the login screen - without starting any GUI. So I went for the Mageia installation DVD.
Since this is no Live DVD - I just went for it.
Used the entire disk and installed Mageia 4 with the Xfce4 desktop.

That all went well so I guess we can set this lap on the usable list - but without Uefi boot for Linux.

It is clear that all the certified secure boot laps are somewhat harder to work with than in the good old days so Microsoft might well succed in forcing this unbelivable crap on their customers.

If there ever was a time for Canonical to come up with their own PC - this must be it

I bought a laptop for my dad. Sadly it has Win 8.
Trying to set that up is one of the worse experiences I ever had.

Suck ass big time.

I bought this one for my mother.

I tried to see if I would at all be able to make it usable to her. The mix of mouse and shortcuts and hot corners and sides - was really confusing. It may barely function on a touch screen - but not here.

She would never have used it.

The OEMS need to stop pre-loading Windows 8 on the computers if they want to sell any. And they need to clean up their act on the BIOS so that efi can be used by other OS'e than Windows 8.

It should be possible to turn of Microsofts "secure boot" and keep Uefi - and install Linux on it.
It should be possible to turn of uefi altogether, and pick legacy boot (Which you can on PB EN TE69KB).

Microsoft is in trouble with this one - even the biggest Windows fans and Linux haters have problems with Windows 8.