The Dell uefi bios on their latitude series has not given me any issue at all with any os. Except OSX, and that is a special weirdness. Asus gaming oriented board tend to be (for lack of a better word) persnickety. And mostly this was an issue with trying to wrangle a dual boot scenario with Windows 10 and they were writing over each other in the boot space of the bios. Even when using grub. It was strange. But the board I have is one of those prosumer/gamer oriented boards so it does not have the simplicity of their workstation boards or dell's work oriented hardware.

On Apr 19, 2016 11:18 AM, "Michael Butash" <michael@butash.net> wrote:
I agree here, it is an important factor, but really only to us linux folk.  Windoze people remain blissfully ignorant mostly except when dealing with the horrible bioses these days built for uefi.  I think diy mobo's will remain safe, but laptops are a wildcard when dealing with non-business class devices.  Dell seems good about keeping legacy boot options at least, and keeping some sense of linux friendliness in general (they do have a desktop linux mailing list people respond on).

Getting that asus laptop that would "only" do uefi was just painful as I had ass-u-me'd that it *could* be switched to legacy boot, and delayed my usability significantly since forcing me to learn some new method with questionable value.  UEFI just seems like another half-way good idea turned terrible by letting microsoft steer and dictate its implementation, as they seemed the only one that cared, and obviously only about the windoze implementation.

I'm all for learning something new, but not when the only value is keeping the relevance of windoze on my hardware, which is entirely undesirable.

-mb


On 04/19/2016 10:34 AM, Steve Litt wrote:
On Tue, 19 Apr 2016 10:02:03 -0700
Wayne D <waydavis@centurylink.net> wrote:


Some day UEFI might be good, but right now you hear too much about
people bricking their mobos via interaction with their OS and the
UEFI storage area, or Linux people doing rm -rf only to find out
that included the mounted UEFI variable area.

And then there's the whole Secure Boot fiasco. No problem if you
use a major Linux that's purchased a key from Microsoft, but all
bets are off if you compile your own kernel.

You really know how to pee on a parade... LOL   Ya, I'm cringing a
little over this one.
If mobo makers want to force UEFI, or worse, Secure Boot on us, well,
I guess that's their right. But this is such an important thing, I
think that ability to boot MBR and ability to turn off Secure Boot
should be a very prominent spec, right along with number of memory
slots and enumeration of extension slots.

The fact that you have to find these things out after having the
product shipped to you, and then play the RMA game or just eat
something you don't want, is inexcusable.

You should contact the manufacturer, and ask it point blank:

1) Can you boot to a genuine MBR, and how?
2) Can you turn off Secure Boot, and how?

SteveT

Steve Litt
April 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21
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