xenopeek wrote:It all reads like a nightmare...
It can be if you're unprepared. It's really not so bad if you understand it. The problem is that almost nobody understands it. Well, that and the buggy implementations, which really boil down to there being more to understand....
And on top of that we have this news, of PCs certified for Windows 8, but without a means to configure secure boot to work with Linux Mint
Lack of Secure Boot support is definitely an LM developer issue. Ubuntu 12.10, upon which LM 14 is based, has (early) Secure Boot support. I hope that the LM developers get this fixed for LM 15.
At the moment, the easiest workaround is to simply disable Secure Boot. This usually isn't very hard, but the required steps are very much machine-specific, since they require fiddling with firmware settings that aren't standardized. Booting with Secure Boot active is possible, but it requires installing extra software that's not part of the LM repositories. In practice, unless you want to re-master the installer, this means disabling Secure Boot, installing Mint, installing extra software, and then re-enabling Secure Boot. This might be worthwhile if you're really concerned about boot-time malware, but for most people it's just not worth the hassle. If you're really interested in trying it, read
my Web page on the topic or
my rEFInd Secure Boot documentation.