Mikeserv Support Forum

I am barely into considering a new pc. I don't have secure boot now, but a new purchase would probably guarantee that hoop to jump through. Its not that I can't do it, but I'm wondering why I would? I believe I'm just going to rely on Android tablets or Chromebooks. If something happens to me, my wife could never figure out what to do on my present setup. She is comfortable with Slackware and her phone, but I need to think about her just being able to turn it on and let it be. She knows that her phone and my tablet will update automagically, then inform her. I hate thinking about this stuff....

I know what you mean, although not all of us here have wives I think all of us are old enough to think about our mortality. As for secure boot on newer boards, on all of them I've seen it's trivial to disable if it's even enabled by default. On most of the boards I've bought in the last 5 years it was disabled by default but the setting is easy to find and disable in the bios. If your current hardware does everything you need it to then there's really no need to build or buy a new one, but I wouldn't let secure boot be a deciding factor. If maintaining Slackware would be a problem for your wife then one option would be to have one of the easy distros installed along side Slackware that would be easy for her to maintain. Keep all your data on a drive that both distros mount so that so that she would have access to it from either distro. I think, as a PC person like the rest of us, you probably wouldn't be happy using only an Android tablet or a Chromebook, I get frustrated trying to do some things in Android that would only take a minute on a regular computer. And Chromebook - I tried that once, never again. Way too locked down. I got a Chromebook about four years ago, it was the most frustrating thing I've ever tried to use. For some types of people it's perfectly fine, but I'm not that type, and as a Slackware user I bet that you aren't either

I've not tried a chromebook yet. I don't know anyone that even has one. She does not care for new stuff. She only checks her email once a month on the PC. Our daughters can help her easily on a phone or tablet. Even the grandkids will help. I'm only 71 yet in decent health. Just thinking.

Secure boot is no problem on x86 machines (it's always disable-able). The worse I've seen is on new Acer laptops, you have to set and use a bios supervisor password before it will let you disable secure boot.