Ah yes, simplicity. MBR, with all its limitations had one killer feature: it was extremely simple.
UEFI, as powerful as it is, is the opposite of simple. Many moving parts, so many potential failure points. Unfortunately, it seems like modern software is just that: more complex and prone to failure.
True, but… When MBR Grub drops to rescue or doesn’t appear at all, it’s not only difficult (at least for newbies) but somewhat random if you can actually boot a given OS. With EFI Grub, I’ve often managed to boot using BIOS boot override to launch a usable Grub configuration.
Actually grub 0.x series had much more useful rescue shell tab completion than the latest release. You could easily list all boot devices, partitions, and even filesystems and their contents. All from the rescue shell. Consequently, you could boot into Linux and reinstall grub in the MBR to fix it. All that without using a boot CD/USB! Good luck doing that with the latest version of grub and UEFI.
Also getting into the BIOS on legacy firmware was also very simple. On most machines it’s the three finger salute followed by either F1, Delete or rarely F11 or F12.
The boot process was simple, and the BIOS had just one simple task: load and execute the first 512 bytes of the disk that was designated as the boot device. That’s it.
Although my last bootloader is adventure was pretty easy…installed a completely separate drive for Linux and wanted to boot off of that drive (sdb). A bug in the Linux mint installer put the bootloader on my the windows drive instead (sda).
Was fairly straightforward to switch over though (change in fstab then installing grub). I use the bios boot selector (F11) for me to select either the win loader or my Linux mint efi.
Am switching over to Linux as primary driver. So tired of nags, ads, “switch to Edge”, long updates, etc. love being able to ssh+x onto that (relatively beefy) box from my laptop and run ides and such.
I have litelarly never broken MBR boot while dual booting and I have done it for at least a decade now. Windows updates and everything, not once has MBR boot been broken for me.
I’ve been struggling with the boot loader for four days now and now my laptop boot loops and I can’t even access my primary OS (still windows) and can only access Ubuntu via flash drive. So yeah this meme is too fucking on.
My problems are usually during the installation, not necessarily related to Arch, but more so that EFI requires its own partition. I’ll partition my disk, forget that I need a FAT32 partition and then have to destroy a partition so I can add in the EFS . The other problem I’ve had is that the bootloader entry sometimes doesn’t get written after installation, so you reboot and then nothing, so you have to boot back into the ISO, remount everything, reinstall the bootloader (in my case, Grub), and reboot again.
Legit question. Outside of FOSS and a few more frames per second on some steam games, why would anyone go through the trouble of installing and configuring a Linux box? Last time I tried I couldn’t get my Bluetooth headphones to work and I had to buy a new webcam because I didn’t know how to compile drivers.
I sorta just accept I’m running a bit slower and everything works on my TinyPC win10 box.
Nvidia drivers can be a hassle on Linux but on windows you need to use the Nvidia driver installer (as far as I know) with a gui and ads, so also a bad experience.
In my experience it usually doesn’t just work at first but after you get used to it and it’s fine. More importantly, if you have a problem you can find it and fix. If you’re not happy with how it looks, change it and if you don’t want companies spying on you, don’t install their software.
Also as someone that sometimes has to use windows I absolutely hate being forced to do updates, like come on I just wanted to turn it off and leave and then I have to wait 5 minutes for it to go through the update and boot again just to turn it back off because it can’t remember that I pressed the off and not reboot button.
If you get used to the terminal, to connect your bluetooth headphones you turn on your bluetooth and type bluetoothctlscan on it’ll scan and return devices by mac address, find yours, type pair [the mac address]connect [mac address]exitexit done.
why would anyone go through the trouble of installing and configuring a Linux box?
It doesn’t cost any money and it doesn’t spy on you. It tends to be “lighter” than Windows, so it generally runs better on older hardware. It is easier to tweak and customize.
I just switch my gaming rig to linux 3 or 4 months ago. First time daily driving linux. I haven’t touched a driver or anything system config related. I don’t think there is a single peice of hardware not working on my box. Im on pop_os! With an amd gpu. Can play any game thanks to steam proton or lutris. Playing wow and cyberpunk right now.
FOSS is a really big reason to run Linux. In ten years you can trust that your Linux install will be running and up to date. In ten years there’s a non-zero chance Microsoft will have moved to a forced subscription model for Windows.
It also just runs faster, can fully update itself and all installed software with a few button clicks or one terminal command, and has tons of options for people who have more technical skill.
Yes but by doing so you’re using the same principles as MBR boot. There’s still this coveted boot sector Windows will attempt to take back every time.
What’s nice about EFI in particular is that the motherboard loads the file from the ESP, and can load multiple of them and add them to its boot menu. Depending on the motherboard, even browse the ESP and manually go execute a .efi from it.
Which in turn makes it a lot less likely to have bootloader fuckups because you basically press F12 and pick GRUB/sd-boot and you’re back in. Previously the only fix would be boot USB and reinstall syslinux/GRUB.
I just had a bug on both of my EFI computers where they wouldn’t boot any more and a grub-install fixed it, apparently the regular update processes do not update the version on the ESP for some reason and my assumption is that it became incompatible with the modules in /boot
Adding an EFI Boot Entry for netboot.xyz after it happened on the first one really helped fix the second one though.
The reality is that a bootloader will seemingly always be needed to account for difficult BIOS’ and legacy setups (I’m looking at you, dual-booted Ubuntu 20.04).
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