I figure I'll add my two cents for as little as that's worth. Personally, I use extlinux with a custom, barebones configuration. On my EFI systems, I use syslinux EFI. I like the simplicity of syntax for syslinux's configuration and how small it is, but that's me, and it's not going to be everyone's preference.
I also own several legacy BIOS based systems that cannot support EFI, and they work fine, including my daily driver Thinkpad T410. While I know it will still be possible for *very* advanced Linux users such as me to get Fedora working on BIOS systems with my own bootloader of choice even if Fedora drops support, it would create a maintenance nuisance if I need to boot a recovery ISO etc or reinstall Fedora from scratch, e.g. in drive failure. And, of course, most Fedora users can't easily swap out a bootloader, they just haven't spent the energy learning those parts of the OS. Though, that would hardly be my concern. As sad as I was to see i686 support dropped, I could at least understand the reasoning behind it, given how few people used it and how large of a maintenance task it was. I myself didn't really use any systems that needed it. This, however, is different. Personally, I despise GRUB2, that's why I switched to syslinux when distros dropped GRUB1. I find GRUB2 very bloated, needlessly complicated, with too many magic black boxes. That said, dropping BIOS support simply to adopt another bootloader in its place is a deeply disturbing proposition. There are many BIOS based systems still in service, and there will be for quite some time. My Thinkpad was manufactured in 2011 and still only supports BIOS. In 2012, I started seeing EFI-based PCs on the market due to Windows 8 and MSFT's push for secure boot. Apple was an exception, they started using EFI as soon as they switched to Intel. The rest of the world remained on BIOS until 2012. Are you seriously considering dropping support for all systems older than 8 years of age? Even if I could mostly work around such a decision, it would anger me and I imagine a great many other users, purely on ideological grounds. I would consider switching distributions, and I've been a Fedora loyalist since 2009. Do you remember when Linux was touted as a lightweight alternative for older PCs, and you could install flagship distros on grandma's PC to breathe new life into it? I do. I don't want to live in the timeline where the only distros that run on such things are puppy linux and similar. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]
