Nobody knows if this will affect anybody at all, as no Secure Boot equipped hardware is in the wild, nor has any manufacturer or OEM announced anything related to it. The fear mongering is based on speculations and worst case scenarios mostly.
edit: I might add that any system that wants to be compatible with Windows 7 or XP needs to have the ability to disable Secure Boot. That fact will probably have larger effect on manufacturers than Linux users.
I agree that this is based on worst case scenarios , but it isn't really a bad thing to be concerned about since nobody has actually ruled out the worst case happening and it represents a plausible possibility to many people.
Even if to begin with it is not a problem and windows 8 does not require secure boot to be enabled for compatibility with older computers it is still possible that windows 9 or even a later service pack will change that once they are happy that there is sufficiently few older computers.
This could create a market for motherboard modification that would allow pirated versions of windows to run.
Getting Windows to run is the least of problems in the current light. The problem is running something that's not Windows. Nobody cares about some lousy pirates.
> I might add that any system that wants to be compatible with Windows 7 or XP needs to have the ability to disable Secure Boot. That fact will probably have larger effect on manufacturers than Linux users.
But MS could update Windows 7 & XP to be compatible, right?
edit: I might add that any system that wants to be compatible with Windows 7 or XP needs to have the ability to disable Secure Boot. That fact will probably have larger effect on manufacturers than Linux users.