Luckily most hardware manufacturers have started to provide bootable images for patching system firmware, and for enterprise-grade hardware they even provide Linux-ready tools. These days I don't own anything that has a valid Windows license, and even my 2008 white MacBook has spent most of its life running either Ubuntu or Fedora. I suppose I'm lucky in that for more than 10 years my primary work environment has been Linux-based, yet all too often I've been forced to dig out a DOS or Windows image because I need to patch some BIOS device firmware.