Fedora 37 Looks To Deprecate Legacy BIOS Support

[brent]

Never understood the problem with these deprecations. Want to continue to use your non-64-bit CPU? Just use something like Ubuntu LTS for the time being, you'll be safe for the next couple of years. Want to keep using your board without UEFI? Same thing. UEFI has been common feature for over 10 years. If you want to keep using old hardware, you have to compromise. That is not a new thing, and in fact, hardware deprecates far more slowly today compared to the early 2000s or 1990s.

[Etherman]

This one is actually dead, it's horribly difficult to setup, it needs direct disk access and breaks far too often.

My favourite boot loader has always been ASP Linux Boot Loader but probably no one here has ever heard about it.

Yes, it's dead. And i haven't used it for a long time now. Because its simplicity it was supereasy to use and maintain. When i tried out grub for the first time grub was super slow with lots of rattling noises from the old harddrive and i reverted back to lilo for a few more years. Good old times.

[skeevy420]

Yes, it's dead. And i haven't used it for a long time now. Because its simplicity it was supereasy to use and maintain. When i tried out grub for the first time grub was super slow with lots of rattling noises from the old harddrive and i reverted back to lilo for a few more years. Good old times.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. GRUB is the only time I have noticeable input lag on my PC.

[birdie]

The more things change, the more they stay the same. GRUB is the only time I have noticeable input lag on my PC.

I have to concur. GRUB has always been crap in terms of performance and even more crap in terms of quirks, bugs and problems. And don't get me started on its god awful config file with little to no documentation.

[Charlie68]

There is a middle ground, between keeping hardware alive today that no longer has a reason to exist, with the fact that the hardware has to last 4 years.
There are 15 year old, updated desktop PCs that are better than a lot of the stuff sold today with uefi.
If I make an investment it is because I believe it should last for years.
However Fedora is free to do whatever she wants, as long as she doesn't complain if users go to other distributions.

[skeevy420]

I have to concur. GRUB has always been crap in terms of performance and even more crap in terms of quirks, bugs and problems. And don't get me started on its god awful config file with little to no documentation.

I basically stick to tweaking "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=" these days. If it's working, don't break it.

At this point I use it out of comfort. Once it's setup it usually just works and keeps on working. IIRC, every severe problem I've had was file system and custom configuration related -- me trying stuff out too early and getting bit in the ass.

Being introspective, I find it very funny how I'll keep using GRUB and Zstd but'll drop BTRFS without question due to the same bug.

[sinepgib]

I have to concur. GRUB has always been crap in terms of performance and even more crap in terms of quirks, bugs and problems. And don't get me started on its god awful config file with little to no documentation.

I agree. The first thing I do after an install is:
- On BIOS machines -> install syslinux;
- On UEFI machines -> either install systemd-boot or just use EFI stub (depending on how lazy I'm feeling).

In the UEFI cases it's just a matter of principles tho, I'd rather not have a redundant step, and if I have it it better be a light and trivial to configure one.

[sinepgib]

There is a middle ground, between keeping hardware alive today that no longer has a reason to exist, with the fact that the hardware has to last 4 years.
There are 15 year old, updated desktop PCs that are better than a lot of the stuff sold today with uefi.
If I make an investment it is because I believe it should last for years.
However Fedora is free to do whatever she wants, as long as she doesn't complain if users go to other distributions.

This 100000%. When I buy a beefy machine it's because I don't expect to change it anytime soon. I'd rather invest the cost of two low end computers and not buy four of them in the following decade. It's also a matter of e-waste, both in terms of the actual hardware and environmental cost of recycling and manufacturing (which is often not taken into account when measuring the impact of fast replace cycles).

[direc85]

I welcome the idea of Fedora 37 dropping BIOS support. I hope they take x86_64_v3 into use at the same go. Why do we have all the new fancy instructions in the CPUs if they are not utilized? For this reason I'm seriously considering Gentoo, or at least recompiling my kernel and a bunch of packages in my current distro of choice with `-march=native`.

I don't understand the "a bleeding edge distro, that I would not run anyway, would not run on my 10yo workhorse" argument. That's what it partially implies. Bleeding edge. Not bleeding edge 10 years ago.

Someone said "the old code works, it doesn't need maintenance." It is like saying "I only fix my car when it stops running." Not the best practice, but an option one can take, nevertheless. Comparing `true` with `grub` in those terms is... unfair at best.

[sinepgib]

I welcome the idea of Fedora 37 dropping BIOS support. I hope they take x86_64_v3 into use at the same go. Why do we have all the new fancy instructions in the CPUs if they are not utilized? For this reason I'm seriously considering Gentoo, or at least recompiling my kernel and a bunch of packages in my current distro of choice with `-march=native`.

I agree.

I don't understand the "a bleeding edge distro, that I would not run anyway, would not run on my 10yo workhorse" argument. That's what it partially implies. Bleeding edge. Not bleeding edge 10 years ago.

But I think there's some misinterpretation here. Most of us arguing about the 10yo workhorse are arguing against a claim that "hardware should last 4 years" a user made. It's not strictly related to Fedora's choice of dropping older hardware support. As many stated, those can use different distros.
Note, tho, bleeding edge distros are about bleeding edge code, so it's not strictly incompatible with running on older hardware. See, for example, Arch Linux 32. You have the very latest packages running on pretty ancient hardware.
But the ones who want it that way should put the work, rather than always expect a third party to serve them for no reason at all.

Someone said "the old code works, it doesn't need maintenance." It is like saying "I only fix my car when it stops running." Not the best practice, but an option one can take, nevertheless. Comparing `true` with `grub` in those terms is... unfair at best.

Yep, that really looks like it comes from someone who never had to maintain any code :shrug: