alt Hacker NewsGrub is like a turd that won't flush. It's been completely unnecessary for years, is massively overcomplicated, pretty much unusable as a shell with it's 1995 idioms, and there are much, MUCH lighter (and as useful) replacements (extlinux etc) -- and you can even just remove it completely and boot the kernel directly these days with the EFI stub...
But still, it gets installed, trying to justify its existence.
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> Grub is like a turd that won't flush. It's been completely unnecessary for years, is massively overcomplicated
shim + grub suck, but bare bones EFI sucks way more, generally speaking. Vendors of consumer-oriented EFI platforms ("client platforms") are batshit insane; they don't offer UEFI console redirection to/from the serial port even if the motherboard has one; they expose neither secure boot configuration nor boot options management to the user, and so on. A purely EFI-based boot loader such as systemd-boot or rEFInd remains the least annoying choice, IMO.
I don't get the hate. It just works for me, always has. And I have dual boot with encryption. It is such a small thing in the grand scheme of things.
Now compare that with booting on arm...
Okay. I have a laptop here with windows, haiku and Linux. And actually the grub (2) configuration to get haiku to start was strange. What exactly do I install best to replace grub?
Or alternatively, I have a PC with only Void Linux. Compatibility mode for booting, since uefi mode did not work (I dont know why - some secure boot shenanigans? MBR vs GPT mode? There is no EFI partition as well). What could replace grub there?
What I don't understand is why GRUB needs to be regenerated every time you add a kernel or OS.
Make the bootloader smart enough to find read the underlying filesystems and find kernels. rEFInd does it. If I put in a bootable USB or install Windows on a second SSD, it just shows up on the menu without explicitly demanding it.
Maybe you have to say "/boot needs to be one of n well-supported filesystem types" but one-size-fits-most is probably good enough, relying on something GRUB for the people running ZFS-atop-RAID6-atop-a-collection-of-128-USB-floppy-drives.
I am perfectly fine with grub and os-prober.
Grub can't even boot my windows install. Maybe it's possible but after spending 4 hours on it I didn't feel like trying anymore.
> completely unnecessary
Is it? How can you boot from encrypted volumes without it? I looked into systemd-boot, but I don't think it's capable.
Setting GRUB up with full-disk encryption and BTRFS snapshots is braindead easy. Maybe it'd be just as easy with Gummiboot or rEFInd, but you know what they say about fixing things that aren't broken.
I thought the advent of UFEI would finally put GRUB to rest.
Worse, if you dual boot and each OS installs its own GRUB you can get all kinds of silly situations where one GRUB will chain load to another GRUB and then boot the OS.
Why not just hit F12 (or whatever) and UEFI gives you this nice little menu of all your boot options right there, before installers can come in and ruin it. (Like Windows that always seems to barge in and put itself on top trashing whatever you had before.)