It’s actually slightly more complicated than that, but yup, worth my vote.

it boils my blood when I watch videos of linux conferences. they are talking about faster file systems and SMP when grub has a lack of manpower to fix their known bugs.
this is like talking about cocktail bar in a car when the wheels are bust.

Usually, a server is a set-and-forget affair. You configure it and just let it run until something breaks and then you fix it. It’s not something you’re updating constantly, and it’s not running anything that pushes any hardware except the CPU and hard drives.

WorksForMe™

PS: My keyboard (and mouse!) works in Grub. Do you know any bootloaders that have advanced graphics and drawing support? A turing complete shell built right in? Mouse/touchscreen support? A Motherf**king IP stack?

Grub is like the f**king sports car of bootloaders. Hell, with some plugins you can probably do everything an OS does from Grub and never even have to a boot a “real” OS.

This is why FOSS is awesome, they don’t cut corners like properitary software companies and only do the bare minimum.

that’s the problem. they try to do everything and can’t get the basics right. why in the name of everything that is holy does KMS load a broken resolution on every other machine. windows has KMS and if you don’t have a driver it drops down to the lowest setting. with linux i have no disable KMS, which breaks whole other things. not to mention that it can’t autodetect that the resolution is broken and fallback, but just sits here.

“Do you know any bootloaders that have advanced graphics and drawing support?”

Why the hells would you want those in a bootloader?

There are storage devices, here are bootable devices, boot the one selected… And that’s it. Why the fork do you need anything more?

“Hell, with some plugins you can probably do everything an OS does from Grub”

At this point GRUB becomes an OS.

This seems to be typical in FOSS. Don’t do one thing and do it well (while praising that as “the UNIX way”), pile on half-baked feature after half-baked feature and still manage to suck at what you’re actually supposed to do.

Like the old joke about EMACS; “EMACS; a great OS, just needs a text editor”

Now we have GRUB – a fully functioning OS, just needs a bootloader.

@Adam:

Wow, that Hairdressing Degree did you proud. It’s astonishing. All of that stuff is precisely what you expect out of a boot-loader. Why, the possibilities are endless.

Ever heard of “separation of concerns,” little man?

Actually I’d be quite happy to cheer Grub on in this (clearly pointless) endeavour, except for one tiny little fact. It doesn’t fit in the limited memory available, and it tends to walk all over itself.

In other words, it doesn’t actually work as a boot-loader. But it’s great at being Turing-complete!

The original Microsoft Basic fit inside 4Kb. It was a bit bloated, because it was Basic. But it still fit inside 4Kb.

Guess what? The original Microsoft Basic was Turing complete!

I think, if I tried hard enough, I could produce a Turing complete “shell” language interpreter (and as we all know, the first thing you reach for when your boot-loader fails to boot-load is your friendly neighborhood shell language) in about 500 bytes, max. It would be unintelligible and stack-based, but then it wouldn’t be unusual in those things.

Back when, we used to call these things “an assembler.”

And, plug-ins in Grub?

From a memory footprint point of view, this is risible.

And from a security point of view (you remember you were banging on about the miracles of MAC recently?) it’s even more risible.

Genuinely, I’m interested. How exactly do you propose to implement a MAC system as a plugin to Grub?

Separation of concerns? Doctor, you expect too much from these guys. It’s software design related and by this time you should already know that they can’t grasp anything from that area.

Don’t know – maybe it’s not fun to actually design things (even though I personally think that design is THE ONLY fun thing in software development) or maybe it’s just that bazaar is not the best place to design things. Whatever reason SimpleFact™ remains: there is no place for software design in Loonixland. Disclaimer: as with most other informal “general rules” (including this disclaimer) there are exceptions, but they are too rare to actually change anything.

@Adam
Just so you realize (still not sure that you will), it’s not bad to have Live-OS-with-Turing-Complete-Shell – it’s just that boot loader should LOAD that OS and not BE one.

The best way to know if something is Turing complete is to include the Turing language in it. It being a Canadian academic programming language only makes it better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language)

I’ve no comment to add about Grub/Grub2. Maybe it’s badly designed, but I’ve never had any problems with it after probably some hundred computers.

No, what I thought about is that the complaints here about Grub sounds a lot like the concerns regarding UEFI. I’m all in favour of it replacing BIOS, and for that there’s many technical advantages, so I’m more thinking about how manufacturers became overly exited about all that extra stuff.

“My keyboard (and mouse!) works in Grub. Do you know any bootloaders that have advanced graphics and drawing support?”

Well Adam, I’ll have you know that Win8 has a fully graphical bootloader with touch support (mouse and keyboard can also be used) and unlike the Durdenian nonsense it actually works, even in pre-alpha.

————————————————

Durden crap-loaders (oops, I meant boot-loaders), on the other hand, still fail after two fvcking decades of supposed development – I guess they spent the time developing the logo (and plugins, and calculus).

that’s the problem. they try to do everything and can’t get the basics right. why in the name of everything that is holy does KMS load a broken resolution on every other machine. windows has KMS and if you don’t have a driver it drops down to the lowest setting. with linux i have no disable KMS, which breaks whole other things. not to mention that it can’t autodetect that the resolution is broken and fallback, but just sits here.
————————

Again, you must have some WinbredHardware™, because I never (I repeat never) had any problem with Grub “just not working”. It’s one of those things that always works, and works 100x better than Windoze’s ancient bootloader.

I’ll give you wifi brokenness (although not true in the past 4 years), and sound mixing brokenness right when PulseAudio was put in Ubuntu (again no longer the case).

But not Grub. That’s something that pretty much always worked.

@Adam:

Do you actually ever do anything with your computer? I’ll accept that in its simpler configurations Grub will JustWork™, but it’s by no means a foregone conclusion.

Typing “grub broken” into Google comes up with this interesting little list:

http://www.unixmen.com/linux-tutorials/1644-fixing-a-few-common-grub-errors-broken-bootloader-and-error-1715

And you’ll notice that absolutely every last link is to a Linux forum of some kind (typically, but not always, Ubuntu).

It’s not “winbreds” who obsess about this stuff. It’s full-blownn dedicated Loons.

Windows’ bootloader is ancient precisely because it JustWorks™. Only an insane incompetent would spend twenty years fiddling with a boot-loader rather than six months writing one that, ahem, boot-loads.

And of course even an insane incompetent might be able to get it right in twenty years — as opposed to the Grub guys.

The only issue I have with the Windows bootloader (and yes, I have an issue with it) is that historically it has been pretty terrible at dealing with alternative OSes. Frankly I don’t see this as a problem that Microsoft should be expected to fix — there’s nothing in it for them.

It is, however, the primary reason why I would want to use Grub. And Grub has never once (in the five or six times I have tackled it) been able to run Windows and Linux side by side.

> historically it has been pretty terrible at dealing with alternative OSes
Well, it (both ntldr and winload) can “boot” Linux in the same way LILO/Grub¹²/Whatever could load Windows – through chain loading. The only issue is configuring it to do so. Well, if you are trying to boot Linux you should already be prepared to do LOTS of manual configuring.

@Linsuxoid:

The irony is, of course, that UEFI will most probably make all this ancientness and irritation completely disappear.

It has everything that Adam (did I mention that I love you, Adam?) could possibly want.

It will render grub completely obsolete and pointless (which is hardly a difficult task).

And, for all those reasons, the freetards have decided to hate it.

@Ted:

(Belatedly.) I thought the old joke about emacs was the acronym “eight megs and constant swapping?”

This is one of those interesting Loon things. Back in the day, this was an actual real problem; partly brought on by emacs’ insistence on reading the entire file in, every time you opened one. Why? I have no idea why. Presumably something to do with badly-written lisp, but I’ve never bothered to look.

Twenty years on, 8MB is to sneer at. And emacs? Every time I open just about any file I can name, along comes a message in the command-line buffer saying “This is a really big file. Are you sure you want to open it?”

Don’t get me wrong. I love emacs.

I just wonder about the mentality behind it, that’s all.

“I’ve no comment to add about Grub/Grub2. Maybe it’s badly designed, but I’ve never had any problems with it after probably some hundred computers.”

this was on a dell preinstalled with ubuntu. right, linux is ready for grandmas.

I don’t doubt your truthfulness, I only stated I’ve not encountered any such problems over the years.

If a preinstalled system doesn’t have a working boot loader, shouldn’t DELL fix free of charge then? It doesn’t require any magic to get it working, even though some here don’t approve its design.

@Kim:

Unfortunately (at least five years ago; things may be better now) it does indeed take magic to get it working.

If it’s already working, no magic is involved.

However, if it’s broken (I’m thinking specifically of a two-byte misalignment problem on 32-bit machines; I had to stare at it through a hex editor to even work out what the problem was), then, to all intents and purposes, yes, it takes magic.

Not every linux distro is downloaded by somebody with rose-tinted glasses. Most people expect a boot-loader to JustWork™. Damn the design, I don’t care about the design, the design can be as full of cruft and hairy bits as the Linux kernel itself (which does sort of work): Grub2 is unreliable.

Frankly, I gave up and fell back to lilo.