Hi everyone. It's been a long time since I posted here, but don't worry, I
haven't gone over to the Dark Side (ie Systemd). I've just been quietly
waiting for Devuan-beta, and in the meantime have tried to keep out of the
way of the Devuan developers rather than waste their time with my ignorant
prattle. At the moment, I'm still happily using antiX, which is thankfully
systemd-free.

Now with that out of the way...

Steve Litt said:

> Grub is the systemd of bootloaders. It's all about pretty colors, nice
> images, and hiding the fact that processes are being instantiated.
>
> What's so sad is that grub 1 was wonderful. One file, everything was
> easy and obvious. Grub2 has different but similar executables, and you
> go traipsing all over a tree of numbered files to change every little
> thing, or else unauthorizedly change the already compiled version and
> hope nothing overrides it.

I couldn't agree more. It's a bit sad that even antiX now defaults to
Grub2, but I manage to keep everything working with Grub1. There is still
the grub-legacy package in Debian, but just to be safe from some
systemd-like stealth operation, I actually keep a small partition with
Puppy Linux installed - it uses Grub1 by default, so I let that be my boot
loader partition. I don't really use Puppy for much else, even though it's
kind of "cute." There are still a few other distros that have Grub1 as the
default (PCLinuxOS, I believe).

Of course, this solution probably won't work if you've formatted your hard
drive with GPT. I'm sticking with MBR for now, even though I don't really
have anything against GPT as such. I'm fortunate in that my computer
supports BIOS booting - I dread this "secure boot" EFI thing that Microsoft
has imposed on the world.

There are some questions I'd like to ask some of you tech-saavy folks about
boot loaders/ boot managers...

1) Any opinions about rEFInd?
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

2) Any opinions about SYSLINUX?

Rod Smith (author of rEFInd) has a good but brief info page on EFI boot
loaders...

http://www.rodsbooks.com/efi-bootloaders/

...but I admit to being a bit confused on which to use.

cheers,
Robert