> These "hardware features", whether its [U]EFI or ME or whatever acronym, IMO is a land grab by hardware vendors over what we know as the "OS". Less computer o

> These "hardware features", whether its [U]EFI or ME or whatever acronym, IMO is a land grab by hardware vendors over what we know as the "OS". Less computer owner control, more vendor control. What control did you have with an old PC BIOS that you now are missing with UEFI? Things like SMM and Intel ME that keep running after your actual OS has started existed and were pretty much ubiquitous before UEFI became common in consumer hardware. They aren't required to implement UEFI, and UEFI doesn't enable them any more than PC BIOS did. > I only need one OS to boot to a working environment. I should be able to choose that OS. You weren't able to choose your PC BIOS any more than you can choose your UEFI implementation now. There are PC BIOS and UEFI motherboards that can accept coreboot or something similar, and in all other cases you're stuck with an opaque vendor blob. At least with UEFI you have an opportunity to write your own software that can be part of the boot process, doing so with a BIOS was usually impossible unless you could install an option ROM. > I do most work on the commandline in text-mode (no graphics layer) and as such I only need one OS, with some basic utilities. When the news came that new computers would have [U]EFI, I considered whether I should just switch from the OS I am using to [U]EFI. It seemed to have all the utilities I would need to do work, along with the ability to extend with new programs. That's great for you but a lot of people want to be able to install different OSes on their hardware. Having to duplicate the hardware initialization code for each would be a major pain and would probably result in a lot of hardware only supporting one OS (e.g. many consumer motherboards would probably be Windows only in this situation). I really don't see how having the firmware wedded to a particular OS is going to give people more choice.