>There's a pretty decent chance nobody else is actually trying. The only other OS getting installed is Windows, and that's probably coming straight from a disk image or a recovery partition.

From TFA: "Note: At this point, I checked that Windows and various other UEFI tools are able to read the variables just fine, so Linux’ output is confirmed to be incorrect."

> The only other OS getting installed is Windows, and that's probably coming straight from a disk image or a recovery partition.

> Especially in laptops, a lot of hardware / firmware issues are simply "solved" by baking a fix into the pre-installed Windows version. It's a solution for 99% of users, so why bother spending time looking into the root cause?

The Windows versions I installed for testing were non-OEM versions. They still behaved as expected.

Notably, Windows didn't just know about all the standard UEFI variables, but also about a non-standard one that I added for testing. This means that there definitely is a way to ask for the list of variables so that the UEFI accepts it (sadly, reverse engineering that is a pain), and that the Linux kernel is most likely the place where an actual fix has to happen.

Of course, yes, at the end of the day, the root cause is a specification non-conformity in the UEFI itself.

> Especially in laptops, a lot of hardware / firmware issues are simply "solved" by baking a fix into the pre-installed Windows version. It's a solution for 99% of users, so why bother spending time looking into the root cause?

I've never really seen a single example of this. Could you provide some?