Flexibility.
The "install" scripts and so on are all horribly broken, and extremely badly behaved in terms of grabbing arbitrary stuff from the environment that has nothing to do with your desired target system. Using them for anything other than modifying the current host system is extremely sketchy at best.
I ended up re-implementing the whole process in a pile of bash (it should have been in something else, but I started in bash, and finished there). The slicing up of the bios segment that it does is also unnecessarily fiddly considering how it's all constructed, it would have been far easier to keep those segments in separate files and then you could just write one buffer after another in any language/tool environment you want.
The whole thing seems like an accident of history that no one wants to fix, which would be approximately congruent with all of the tooling in that area of the boot path, partition tools and so on.
I can’t really speak to Fuchsia systems, but a lot (most?) Linux desktop distros use stub or systemd-boot bootloading these days. And if you want to get fancy, there’s rEFInd.
Which ones are you thinking of? Most 'desktop' distros I've used recently still default to Grub (Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, Ubuntu) though I'd certainly be glad if change is on the horizon.
Also why MS' bootmgr stuff is still a flaming pile of junk.
Edit: And why MS has never given us a way to dictate where it installs its junk and/or to not install its junk!!!!!!
To clarify a bit too, as it seems it may not have been clear: grub was never run or installed inside a fuchsia system, I was building disk images from Linux hosts.
If I had to do it again, I'd probably just write a loader myself. It took about the same amount of time to fight grub as it would have done to smush together a basic GPT / FAT / jump chain.
Encrypted boot partition I'd guess? I tried that once with grub, but it was unbearingly slow, because grub did not / could not use modern x86 extensions to do the decryption. So not a common use case either, maybe a desirable one.
Granted, prior to Debian Bookworm I had to roll my own initramfs- and kernel-hooks, but there were blog posts and I didn't need to develop them.
I even tried directly booting into Linux EFISTUB, but thats uselessly annoying compared to a proper bootloader.
it's a literal checkbox install option on Ubuntu at least a few versions back (i'm not up to date), so I wouldn't call it uncommon.
Isn't it deliberately slow to resist brute forcing? At least at one point, the default number of rounds in cryptsetup was decided by counting how many rounds it could do in 10s as part of the setup process on your specific machine
It's far from clear how grub works, uprade or otherwise, period.
Much less how to configure it or install it.
Sendmail.cf or jq level configuration language in terms of obscurity.
Cryptic error messages the severity of which is impossible to infer (actual impact being from no impact whatsoever to my computer won't boot anymore).
Not my favorite piece of Linux software by a very large margin.
I guess reading the manual isn't popular these days, but GRUB has a complete one that explains it all.
Configurations are supposed to use a languages that is just powerful enough to express it. The more declarative the better. Shell is a very bad configuration language because it allows to do way too much and is very forgiving of errors.
Now, add to this that GRUB installation is trying to do configuration too... and if you are doing stuff like creating VM images or similar, where you have to install packages in an environment that's not a real physical computer with a bunch of periphery attached, you will run into all sorts of problems (because for some reason GRUB wants to have a PTY and a bunch of other devices / pseudo-filesystems that it has no business sticking its fingers into) and if you aren't present at the keyboard during package upgrade / install you might not even notice that GRUB has failed to install / install correctly.
So does quantum field theory, which, as a matter of fact, has many manuals.
Doesn't mean either QFT or grub are understandable or even usable by mere mortals.
Difference being than in the case of grub, given what is does, the complexity and opacity of the manual, config languages and diagnostics message is completely unnecessary.
IMHO it contains enough functionality (filesystem access, user interface, program execution, etc.) that it could already be considered an OS itself.
That's what ZFSBootMenu[1] is, an OS to start the OS. And as sibling points out, if you're using EFI you got an OS booting your OS booting your OS...
It's what I use for dualbooting Windows and Linux. It's really easy to Install, Use & Understand.
It's very odd. Instead of the GRUB menu, only a countdown number shows up on the top-left (5,4,3,..) with an underscore behind it. "5 _". All the rest is black.
When the countdown finishes, the system boots into the (UEFI) BIOS.
If I use the BIOS' boot disk selector, then it also happens both when I directly select the Ubuntu installation as well as when I select the GRUB bootloader.
I hope I'll enjoy the ride.
