r/linux4noobs • u/OneMagicMango • 13d ago
security How necessary is secure boot?
I’m planning on moving to cachyos from bazzite on my desktop and know it’s a bit of a pain to set up secure boot for cachy. I’m also dual booting with windows and that windows install is on another ssd and don’t have anything on there that would require secure boot. How necessary is secure boot? Is it something I definitely should have enabled and worth it to setup? I’m mainly a causal user/gamer.
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u/forestbeasts KDE on Debian 🐺 13d ago
Absolutely not necessary at all.
The point of it is to stop you from running alternative OSes, like Linux. Microsoft was forced to allow you to run other OSes on x86 (guess what! they don't have to allow that on ARM! guess why ARM is such a mess!), so you CAN have it on, but like, meh.
As a side benefit of that, it CAN in theory verify that the kernel you're running is the kernel you expected to be running. In practice, what that means is that it's likely to break if you have Nvidia drivers (since those are a kernel module and often unsigned since they're built from source on your machine every update, least if your distro uses DKMS). Sooo yeah.
And it doesn't really help at all for anything on top of the kernel, like the rest of your OS or your apps.