There was also a particular optical drive that would brick if installing from a particular I believe Red Hat Linux installation cd, though I can't find a source for this (personal experience with 2 drives - warning was in manual). -This was ~20 years ago.
"Matthew says with about 20 lines of code on Windows, you can cause the same havoc. He points out that mounting EFI variables as read-only could break some user-space applications and isn't the solution to the problem."