Comment 25 for bug 1366546

Affects also SONY Vaio Pro 13. Experienced this bug in August 2013 when initially staging the brand new machine. Wasted a couple of hours on it. Fixed it manually, essentially doing what Benjamin suggested in the original report. Thought it was a SONY idiosyncrasy not worth reporting.

IT IS SHOCKING TO FIND THIS BUG MENTIONED IN THE RELEASE NOTES TO 16.04LTS (intentional caps).

Sure there is a standard and everybody *should* abide by the standard. However, there are facts on the ground that weigh more and when those facts go against the standard, one has to balance between the cost of flouting the standard and the cost of flouting the user's need.

Cost of flouting the user's need: average users expecting out-of-the-box performance get frustrated with Ubuntu and give up.

Cost of flouting the standard: minimal. So some piece of zealously standard-abiding software will "think" that it was booted from a removable drive? Some extremely well engineered hardware designed for security will disable access to resources, fearing that this is a smuggled removable drive that should not be allowed access to the organization's secrets? All of these are probably unlikely because the same sloppy manufacturer that flouted the standard in the first place would have to implement this kind of safety. And they are quantitatively irrelevant since there are more mainstream consumers trying to install Ubuntu on their devices than highly sophisticated, secured corporations.

Standards are not set in stone. They do change. Keeping this bug alive for so long is one of those papercuts that make ordinary people prefer the proprietary systems. Ordinary people don't care if the system does not abide by the standard. They care that the system works.