ok it is true that these partition types are older than I previously assumed.. but the statement about "forced to use secure boot" .. that is not true at all, yes lots of devices are forced to use UEFI secure boot. In fact, a quote from a Debian derivative recently stated "we use a kernel from Canonical to support booting a wider range of devices" .. because they just want to do that? no one is making them do that? really, the market truth of laptops and cloud VMs is requiring UEFI in a calculated way, with the keys being issued and managed centrally from MSFT. info welcome