Hacker News Reader

Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

I think it could also be worthwhile to figure out ways to:

- Avoid requiring the user to figure out how to get into BIOS/EFI and change boot order. Windows has APIs for manipulating EFI things, may be worth looking into that.

- Replace GRUB with something more modern like rEFInd or Clover with a nice looking theme.

For the latter point, while GRUB is technically functional, it looks scary and arcane to new users and has little resiliency to things like Windows updates mucking with boot entries. It makes for a bad first impression (“why is my computer showing hacker screens suddenly”) and when it breaks your average user doesn’t have a prayer of fixing it. Something that looks more modern and self-heals would be a big improvement.

View on HN

> - Replace GRUB with something more modern like rEFInd or Clover with a nice looking theme.

Replace Grub with nothing. If you're not doing bootable snapshots like openSUSE, then there is virtually no benefit in a "boot loader". The linux kernel + cmdline (+other stuff like ucode or secure boot signing stuff) can easily be packed into a single bootable .efi file.

That efi file will then get an entry in your uefi boot device list just like windows already has/had. This way is better anyway, since windows will overwrite your uefi boot order with every significant update, meaning users will already need to know how to boot other os's.

rEFInd is more or less exactly that.

And efistub is exactly what the GP wants. Reserve rEFInd and its ilk for Snapper setups.

How do you anticipate users choosing Windows or Linux at boot time without a bootloader?

If the idea is they go cold turkey full Linux, good luck with that.

if the idea is they use their UEFI firmware boot menu, you're forgetting how unintuitive that is for most users with most uefi interfaces (spam hotkey at boot, wait for slow loading uefi, navigate to subscreen with boot order, find right menu item, either reorder and save or press F-key combo to "boot once now")

I've not had a MB where you had to spam any key. Just hold it on boot and wait until you see the menu. Select the one you want to boot now with either mouse or keyboard. This doesn't usually change the default boot order.

If you managed to install linux then this really shouldn't be a thing to get hung up on.

If you don't understand why GRUB's (or refind or systemd-boot) boot menu is preferable to your UEFI interface, then I'm glad your solution works for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com