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by RealStickman_ 2153 days ago
I'd say support in distros. With grub you can throw pretty much any distro onto your machine and it will show up (except Solus) . Also I don't think you can just choose which bootloader you want in most distros except Arch and Debian if I remember correctly. You can do that manually of course, but grub is easy and it works.
2 comments
zaarn 2153 days ago
In arch you can choose the bootloader as well. The recommendation I hear a lot and that I use is systemd-boot (formerly gummiboot), which strangely doesn't have much to do with systemd.

It can pick up Windows for multiboot and is straightforward to configure (can even be configured from a windows live disk if you mount that FAT partition).

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RealStickman_ 2153 days ago
Well, I just had a look at the Arch Wiki article on Boot Loaders [1]. GRUB is by far the most widely supported and also the most widely compatible bootloader.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_boot_process#Boot_...

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zaarn 2153 days ago
The table is somewhat misleading. The filesystem support for example refers to being able to boot a kernel that is on that FS from disk.

In most gummiboot setups, your kernel will be on the ESP partition along with everything else, so it doesn't matter what FS the root is.

The lack of support for MBR or BIOS doesn't matter much either, systemd-boot requires a 64bit System and most 64-bit systems that are still around and largely used (or actively sold) have a UEFI that supports GPT. If you absolutely need to, systemd-boot supports booting from a GPT that has a MBR wrapper.

So while the table looks like systemd-boot lacks support for a lot of things, the reality is that when you setup systemd-boot a lot of these columns simply don't matter

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RealStickman_ 2153 days ago
So does that mean that I can't use those filesystems for my /boot/efi partition and everything else is ok? Then it's really not that bad. I haven't played around with other boot manager as you might be able to tell.
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zaarn 2153 days ago
That's pretty much your limitation; your linux kernel + initramfs can't be on filesystems other than VFAT (ie, must be on the ESP but there is some ways you can have it work across disks).

Hence the table being slightly misleading.

For example, it also mentions that EFISTUB means you can't boot on btrfs and friends anymore. But it's the same limitation, initramfs and kernel need to be on the ESP, everything after that is up to the initramfs to bring up.

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globular-toast 2153 days ago
Obviously you can with Gentoo. That's basically its "thing" (choice).
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RealStickman_ 2153 days ago
Oh yeah, I forgot about Gentoo.
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