I’ve seen people advocating for both options, but since I’m still new to Linux I’m not sure what to do. I’m currently installing Mint on my laptop to try it out, and I’m not sure if I should enable secure boot or not.
Simply: Do the protections against someone taking your computer and installing a malicious program before/as your OS, or a program that has attained root on your machine and installs itself before/as your OS, matter enough to you to justify the increased risk of being locked out of your machine and the effort to set it up and understand it.
If you don’t understand and don’t want to put in the effort to, then my advice would be to leave it off. Its simple, and the likelihood it saves you is probably very miniscule.
Short answer: off
Long answer: If you won’t use your system for gaming (or anything requiring third-party drivers) and trust Microsoft to not fuck up and will also encrypt your disc, then Secure Boot makes you safer. Otherwise it just causes trouble.
You can also create your own certs.
Secure boot has always caused me headaches in the past.
If you want the extra security, go for it. If you don’t care, turn it off.
If you’re not actually going to be engaging in securing anything with it, just leave it off to avoid issues.
I use Linux Mint and I disabled it because it was blocking the nvidia driver from initiating. I’m sure I could fix it, but can’t be arsed to.
Yeah not sure how it works on Mint, on OpenSUSE after reboot it asks if you want to enroll the new keys into it. If you miss the timer you will boot and driver will bork
Its main purpose is to prevent malware from booting. In my experience its main purpose seems to be preventing me from booting things I want like ventoy flash drives, nvidia drivers, and Linux distros that don’t support it. Same goes for tpm module. Its main purpose seemed to be the switch keeping win 10 from upgrading. I turned them both off and haven’t felt the strong need to turn them back on yet.
That said, and my bad computing habits aside, you probably should turn them ON. I’m not sure they will do all that much realistically speaking, but if it isn’t getting in your way (and it shouldn’t), then ON isn’t a bad default state to be in.
