In the land of Linux:

Why are we still using grub and a bunch of weird shell scripts, convoluted config files, and esoteric commands (which are thankfully usually automatically called by something else) instead of something simpler, more modern, and robust?

(I guess that probably means sd-boot or really almost anything other than grub.)

"It works" isn't really an answer, because grub is so fragile and it far-too-often does not work.

grub is delicate deep magic wrapped in layers of duct tape.

@garrett and for most setups systemd-boot would do everything that is really needed with a fraction of the complexity

@garrett "always has been 🔫 "

@garrett Not all of us are. SystemD is right there. @pid_eins

@trelane @pid_eins Right, agreed. That's my point. It's there. Why aren't distros using it already? (Inertia, I'm sure, but that's not a good reason.)

@garrett @trelane Debian + Suse have signed sd-boot in place, and in particular Suse is defaulting to it in some editions. Arch is pretty much there too. The problem is pretty much Fedora/RH at this point. RH's boot team has been pursuing alternatives to both grub and sd-boot for the last decade or so, with – let's say – "mixed" results, and always sinking more and more resources into it. At this point I figure it's pretty much down to that, since too many folks from other distros…

@garrett @trelane … just do whatever RH does on this, regardless what it is.

I think at the point it's kinda a personal issue for the people involved who hold things back, I cannot interpret things any other way.

@garrett I guess part of the question is "when can we drop legacy BIOS boot?". While you need to support both, letting Grub abstract some of the differences isn't the worst idea.

While pretty much all modern x86 systems support UEFI, I suspect there is a bunch installed in BIOS mode either because that's what the user was used to or that just happened to be how the install media booted. There's probably also a bunch of legacy boot VMs out in the cloud too.

And it's not exactly trivial to switch them over to UEFI if there's no space reserved for an ESP.

@jamesh @garrett my recommendation regarding this issue has been the same for the last decade: maybe don't let your designs be limited by weakest device in your focus, but by the strongest, and then figure out how to fill in the gaps for the weaker ones in a reasonable way.

More specifically: instead of buying into the grub way of doing things, just do sd-boot, and then put together a minimal compat build of grub that behaves like sd-boot as much as possible for other systems.

@jamesh @garrett the latter would mean: make a grub build that just does vfat + bls and be done.

And for legacy install just leave things as they are, and continue with grub as traditionally done, no need to risk it.

@jamesh @garrett Frankly, I don't see how Grub can be a truly viable option in the longer run, if people start to care about verified boot, about ukis, and so on, because the way how it works are not really conceptually compatible with that. I wished the RH boot folks would start to understand that.

@garrett Fedora uses it as the default? :-) At least my Fedora 41 installation uses Grub.

@garrett I use systemd-boot e.g. in my ad-hoc VM's and stuff like that but for my host desktop I don't care how it boots, as long as it boots (unless I'm paid to figure out, not saying it wouldn't be fun and interesting).

In that sense +1 for systemd-boot. I don't mind as long my computer boots.

@jarkko Fedora only officially uses grub, and this includes Silverblue too.

I've been bitten by another grub issue on my work and personal computers.

At least I was able to easily solve my work computer; my personal computer is a mess I might have to deal with over the weekend, by transferring 4TB info to a USB disk, reinstalling, and transferring it back. Not looking forward to the many hours of that.

Hopefully I can just fix grub... somehow. But it's not looking very good at the moment.

@garrett The conclusion that Grub must die is anyway pretty obvious one.

Grub is what it is because it was "UEFI" before UEFI.

@jarkko Right, that's the problem:

I've hit a few grub issues over the years where the system suddenly does not boot. On multiple systems. (It's not hardware related.)

Since grub is so complex, it's somewhere between hard to impossible to fix when you encounter a bug that's even somewhat grub related.