Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Secure Boot
Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2012–2025), in 15 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Disabling Secure Boot is hard and undocumented for usersUnreviewed
20122026- Turning off Secure Boot shows a shaming screen meant to discourage it2025-08-01
- Setting up Secure Boot keys requires chaining many scripts and tools, which is hard for users2023-07-27
- Secure Boot silently blocks things, so users must search online to find the cause2023-05-12
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 15 complaints
- Turning off Secure Boot shows a shaming screen meant to discourage it2025-08-01
- Users would need to manage extra keys they can't remember or get locked out2025-07-18
- Confusing to tell identical drives apart in UEFI boot configuration2025-07-18
- Moving a hard disk between computers requires jumping through hoops due to Secure Boot2025-04-01
- Users must manually update motherboards with confusing guidance; Linux users left to interpret Microsoft's instructions themselves2023-12-20
- Setting up Secure Boot keys requires chaining many scripts and tools, which is hard for users2023-07-27
- Secure Boot silently blocks things, so users must search online to find the cause2023-05-12
- Setting up your own signing keys is so hard that users disable Secure Boot instead2023-01-17
- Key enrollment is manual, finicky, and can brick hardware if done wrong2022-04-21
- Swapping Secure Boot keys is poorly documented and hard to discover, especially on mobile2020-10-25
- Jumping text makes the content hard to read2016-08-10
- Dual-booting Linux fails with blank screens and needs hard-to-find BIOS and UEFI changes2015-03-21
- Hard to find the right key press and navigate confusing firmware menus to disable Secure Boot2015-03-03
- Secure Boot option is grayed out, must find hidden key deletion steps before disabling2013-10-21
- Disabling Secure Boot is hard and undocumented for users2013-05-05