Once starts shipping on PCs, however, that may no longer be possible. It turns out that a new feature included in the operating system in the name of security may also effectively make it impossible to load Linux on officially Windows 8-certified hardware.

"It's probably not worth panicking yet," wrote Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett in a Tuesday on the topic. "But it is worth being concerned."

'It Won't Be Installable'

The problem derives from Microsoft's decision to use a hardware-based secure boot protocol known as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) in Windows 8 rather than the traditional BIOS we're all familiar with. Microsoft principal lead program manager Arie van der Hoeven explained and demonstrated UEFI in a talk at the company's BUILD conference earlier this month, and that explanation is still available .

Essentially, the technology is designed to protect against rootkits and other low-level attacks by preventing executables and drivers from being loaded unless they bear a cryptographic signature conferred by a dedicated UEFI signing key.