Fedora 37 Looks To Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 37 Looks To Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

For the Fedora 37 release later this year the developers are looking at deprecating legacy BIOS support and making UEFI a requirement for x86_64 systems...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-37-Deprecate-BIOS

[Etherman]

I upgraded to UEFI boot last year.

[milkylainen]

Calling UEFI a nice solution to something-something undefined arch legacy would be quite the stretch...

[ThanosApostolou]

My main PC which I built on 2012 has fx-8150 cpu and motherboard GA-970A-DS3 which only supports bios. And with current prices I'm not going to buy a new one at least until early 2023... This is one of the main reason I abandoned fedora when I was distro hopping and I use arch since then. They deprecate things way too fast. They removed 32bit support when I still had one 32bit laptop then (thankfully not anymore)... they stopped supporting 32bit uefi when I just had put fedora on a intel tablet with 32bit uefi (now it runs arch thx to awesome arch wiki)... They remove software from the repositories way too soon while enterprise and academic software still depends on it... Thankfully with things like distrobox and if fedora toolbox supports more distributions other than fedora in the future it won't be so important (I'm thinking about trying silverblue/kinoite in maybe 1-2 years).

[mangeek]

I think this is a good move. Also, I think -most- installations could even skip GRUB and use EFISTUB. I think maybe they should offer an installation option for 'flexible boot' (GRUB) or 'direct boot' (EFISTUB).

[mangeek]

My main PC which I built on 2012... only supports bios.

Respectfully, a cutting-edge distro shouldn't have to hold back to cover hardware that hasn't been supported for years. There are LTS distros that handle all the things you're talking about. You should be running CentOS Stream 9 or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (later this month), which will let you squeeze almost 15 years out of hardware that was meant to last 4.

[skeevy420]

There is no migration story from Legacy BIOS to UEFI - repartitioning effectively mandates a reinstall. As a result, we don’t drop support for existing Legacy BIOS systems yet, just new installations.

What about using Clover since it offers an emulated EFI?

Legacy BIOS users are forced to use that bootloader and UEFI users could have it as an option.

And to kill two birds with one stone -- if forced upon everyone y'all'd have a GUI to access the GUI based recovery environment.

Yo dawg

[skeevy420]

I upgraded to UEFI boot last year.

Me too. I'd still be BIOS if that system didn't up and quit on me.

[kozman]

Some day, eventually, even that ancient 25+ year old dinosaur running off a BIOS will die. A cap will fail, something will oxidize to the point of not working or enough of a temperature change will break some lead, trace or solder that can't be fixed. It's fun to keep these old relics alive but it's got hobbyist written all over it.

I'd imagine that some day there will come a time when even the most die hard maintainer will retire, die or just stop maintaining whatever code that still supports such old machines and users will have no choice but to run an old distro to make it work. For the same reason we've gone from steam powered trains to Shinkansen is why, eventually, time and progress will obsolete old hardware.

[Nuc!eoN]

It seems to become a trend recently, to depreciate everything. Probably accepted the Great Reset by now