17 Sept 2025 09:59:26 fraser via Dng <dng@???>:

>> It's not harmful. The efi does not have to be right at the beginning
>> of the disk and does not need to be the first partition.
>>
>> I like to make a small partition in front of the esp for a bios grub
>> partition in case I ever want or need to boot the gpt disk in legacy
>> mode instead of uefi. It needs to be at least 1 MB and not have a
>> filesystem on it. I generally give it 2 MB. Partition type is ef02 in
>> gdisk.

Maybe I have lost the thread of UEFI not being harmful but one unforeseen problem that could never happen with legacy mbr due to it's simplicity is that.

I have a gifted tablet running 32 bit windows even though it has a 64 bit processor because it has 32 bit uefi and no legacy compat. I got Linux mint installed and had to fix up the 64 bit booting but the intel gpu was a bit jerky. I'm not going to work out if that is even possible with Windows. It would have just worked without UEFI and saved me more time than I should have spent. So IMO UEFI complexity is harmful. Do we get onto exploits as UEFI firmware is as always written in C because I dunno maybe the NSA like it that way in which case perhaps I'm fine with it.