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**dequire** · Nov 28, 2016, 02:07 PM

Awesome work!

**Qqmike** · Nov 28, 2016, 05:01 PM

remembering the old cartoon, circa 1950-60?,

“I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant's faithful one-hundred percent!”

http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes...atches-the-egg

**oshunluvr** · Nov 29, 2016, 08:55 AM

Qqmike - going to the expert here - What reasons are there to prefer UEFI over GRUB? Are there benefits?

In my case: I have a fully functioning almost automatic GRUB multi-boot system. This was created because I had an old PC that didn't support UEFI booting. Now this week, I upgraded so I have the potential to change over, but should I? If so, why?

To my delight I discovered when I booted my new mobo for the first time is was defaulted to "Legacy + UEFI" mode which is self explanatory I believe - it booted my grub disk without requiring anything from me. My current setup has grub installed on two drives in dedicated partitions (one for backup). This "main" grub allows me (via a simple stanza) to select all my installs (all linux) from their own grub.cfg in each one of their own "secondary" grub menus. The simplicity of this is furthered by the fact that all my current installs reside on a single btrfs filesystem so the UUIDs are all the same. An update to any given install that changes grub.cfg only updates itself and doesn't touch the "main" grub.

If I add or delete a distro, I need only go into the grub.cfg on the "main" grub and add/delete the stanza to reflect the subvolume that has been added/deleted. I could even simplify further by using subvolume names from a generic set - like "distro_1, distro_2, etc." Then I wouldn't even have to edit the grub.cfg at all. Or I could write a little script to do it, but editing it isn't really that big of a deal.

I will likely be adding a new boot device or two (my new mobo supports M.2 Gen 3 drives and SATA express) so I will have an opportunity to switch over to UEFI sometime next year, but I'm wondering why and how much work would it be to maintain and will it work in my current setup. I would appreciate any thoughts...

**Qqmike** · Nov 29, 2016, 10:55 AM

I can't think of any advantages in switching from GRUB Legacy or GRUB2 to the newer UEFI.

This assumes that you have the skills to maintain previous GRUB systems, which you do. Btw, I always used the same setup you have: a dedicated GRUB partition, containing configfile statement -- really simple and clean, if you know what you are doing (like making sure you get updates or don't get updates, the way you prefer).

Now, for the average user, well, times are changing, people buying new systems that come with UEFI, so why not switch over ASSUMING you don't wish to manually mess with and maintain an older GRUB booting/boot management system.

I think the RealExperts^TM would agree with my take on this, based on my reading of their blogs and articles.

Now, having said all that ...

Fact is, for those of you who do wish to go with the newer UEFI systems, two things:

(1) If you have a simple setup (like one or two or three OSs), just go with GRUB2-EFI and don't worry about it.

(2) If you have a more complex system, you can surely go with GRUB-2, no problem, see my
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post379977
for dual-booting options.

Or ...

Continuing with (2) (where you have a complicated UEFI system) ...
... simply install the boot manager rEFInd and let it take care of all the details!
my tips on doing that would be
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post372221

The other day I wanted to experiment with dd progress monitoring, I needed a newer 16.04 system (I'm still on 14.04), so in a vacant partition I installed 16.04 but did not let it install any GRUB2-EFI so as not to mess up my existing system boot setup. So how to boot into that new 16.04? Easy as pie: I already had rEFInd installed, so all I had to do was identify the 16.04 kernel listing in the rEFInd boot menu, highlight it, press Enter, and it booted into 16.04 just fine.

So, back to your question, if you have the proficiency required, I see nothing wrong with using GRUB Legacy or GRUB2 for booting. I'm fairly sure that a lot of people have not switched over to UEFI and don't plan to unless somehow forced to do so. I really enjoyed using the old GRUB Legacy -- it was fun, and you felt you had tons of control over the grub boot menu (the old menu.lst).

**oshunluvr** · Nov 29, 2016, 11:01 AM

Thanks Mike. Yeah, I see that eventually the eye-candy and capabilities of EFI (in particular rEFind) will out pace grub2 but frankly, I could care less if my boot screen looks super cool or not. I think I'll stick with grub for now.

BTW, I'm using grub2 aka grub-pc vs. grub aka grub-legacy aka grub1. They could have done a better job with the naming thing...

**Qqmike** · Nov 29, 2016, 11:11 AM

They could have done a better job with the naming thing...

Boy, ain't that the truth! I just make up the names. Like this conversion table would show:

(Mine on the left)

GRUB Legacy --> GRUB1
GRUB2 --> GRUB-PC
GRUB2-EFI -->

I think people just say GRUB2 for EFI or some-such!

And one can always check their
/usr/lib/grub/
to see what really is there!

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