Why UEFI?: Was UEFI

[Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com>]

On Wed, 9 Jul 2014 15:53:22 +0200
Bzzzz <lazyvirus@gmx.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 09 Jul 2014 16:26:16 +0300
> Georgi Naplatanov <gosho@oles.biz> wrote:
> 
> > You have to enable (U)EFI on your computer and Debian 7.x/8 should
> > install just fine.
> 
> Yup, the 7.5 (amd64) netinstall has the EFI partition.
> 
> BTW, sorry to hijack a bit this thread, but what could
> be the advantages to use UEFI (I just have Debian on my
> laptop and disabled it from ancient posts I read).

I can answer that. If you don't want to pay insane System76
prices, you buy a commodity laptop for $400 for 4GB, or $600 for 8 to
12GB. You get a manufacturers warranty, which qualifies you to call in,
have tech support talk you through their silly song and dance, and then
they either have you send it in or send you a part (like a battery).

Now here's the thing: Tech support is too stupid to talk you through
determining whether a battery failure is hardware or software without
their warm and fuzzy Windows utilities. If you tell them Windows is no
longer on the computer, they say "sorry, your warranty is no longer
valid." So you need a dual boot, for nothing more than warranty.

Windows 8 is always installed on UEFI. You can turn off secure boot in
the bios if it's not an arm machine, but you can't install Windows 8 on
an MBR with the laptop's restore partition, and you probably don't want
to spend the money to buy a Windows install CD to install it on an MBR
(if it can be done at all).

I just know somebody will mention that I could spend an extra $80 for
another hard drive, and just switch hard drives when I want to switch
OS's. Not my style. Therefore, I install Linux on UEFI partitions on my
new laptops, and so far I've only been able to do that with Ubuntu,
because Debian does strange things with the menu (don't ask me to
remember "strange", it's been months).

Once a laptop goes out of warranty, I feel free to put any distro, or
any type of BSD I want on the machine.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
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