As as someone who just wants to install the OSes of their choice on their machines, the main takeaway I got was
> there used to be a thing called BIOS that was dead simple to deal with and did what you want. Now there is a replacement called UEFI that is insanely complicated to deal with and (at least in practice) makes it hard to do what you want.
I'd amend your statement to be "There used to be a very limited thing called BIOS, a collection of historical hacks, which only did one thing decently, but not really well. To make matters worse, in all cases but this one, it completely fell apart. There was no consistent tooling, and when it worked, it was non-inspectable black magic even to the most sophisticated power-user. The limitations of BIOS booting caused different OSes to constantly step on each others feet."
UEFI is different, but actually has a design, supports tooling, any OS can work with it seamlessly without fear of collision, and as result it handles all scenarios simple or complex equally well.
As a bonus it can also do a million things BIOS couldn't, like loading a Linux-kernel directly, from acoss the network, without any intermedia-bootloading proxy or iPXE shim.
Now you can actually put your bootloader setup in source-control. I'm not sure why you would do that, but please go ahead and try that with BIOS.
So yeah. UEFI really isn't that complex. It's just different. It just seems more complex because now even regular guys like us can see all the moving parts, where in the past only OS-designers could peek in.
Really weird to see this downvoted. IMHO, UEFI is a godsend from the terrible BIOS days. Things like ipmitool could sometimes be used to control the BIOS on server hardware, but efibootmgr is much better, and available everywhere now.
If I were to take a guess, it would be that some people think the UEFI spec is over-complicated and tries to do too much things, and that the firmware-level is not where all these things should be done.
It would have been fully possible to create something better than BIOS without (effectively) creating a new mini MS-DOS inside the machine firmware. The buggy UEFI firmwares some people has had to suffer also lends hand to that argument: A simpler specification would probably have caused people fewer issues.
Sometimes less is more. I suspect UEFI would have been more warmly received had it taken a lower aim. It probably didn't help either that it was initially (wrongfully?) associated with Microsoft, and a hostile anti-Linux takeover of the X86 platform at firmware level.
(Not a downvoter, but) I'm just saying that as a user who doesn't know what things like ipmitool or efibootmgr are, all I know is that it was very easy to install OSes as I wanted, dual-boot, etc with BIOS and whenever I hear about UEFI it's scary/intimidating, for instance this article says:
> If you absolutely insist on having more than one OS per disk, understand everything written on this page, understand that you are making your life much more painful than it needs to be, lay in good stocks of painkillers and gin, and don’t go yelling at your OS vendor, whatever breaks.
I've dual-booted with multiple OSes per disk with BIOS several times and had no problems at all. So I can't help but get a bad impression of UEFI.
> I've dual-booted with multiple OSes per disk with BIOS several times and had no problems at all. So I can't help but get a bad impression of UEFI.
I think this article was written back when you had to setup everything UEFI manually, at least in the Linux-world. I don't think all parts still applies.
These days most of these things should be taken care of automatically for you, by the OS vendor, just like they used to in the BIOS past.
Except now you wont have to mess around with installation-order, custom bootloaders or weird grub-entries. It's all handled natively by UEFI.
> there used to be a thing called BIOS that was dead simple to deal with and did what you want. Now there is a replacement called UEFI that is insanely complicated to deal with and (at least in practice) makes it hard to do what you want.
Is that accurate?