Your problematic example seems like a limitation coming from implementation rather than a technical problem. Forgive me if I’m incorrect but on most UEFI based

Your problematic example seems like a limitation coming from implementation rather than a technical problem. Forgive me if I’m incorrect but on most UEFI based systems shouldn’t the boot loader and all it’s dependencies live in the FAT32 EFI filesystem? I know GRUB2 (which tends to be the most frequently shipped Linux bootloader for the major distros) is self contained in that regard; boot stanzas pertaining to Windows just point at Windows’ `boot.efi`, with the GRUB chain-loading that EFI program. Deleting the Linux partitions your using should not affect that Windows entry. Of course, it will knacker your Linux entries; though depending on how your distro does things, if the kernel and initial ramdisk are in the EFI you may get dumped into an emergency prompt on the root of the initial ramdisk (your “half-boot” example) and have the kernel itself tell you it can’t find the filesystems it’s supposed to use as the system root. But if GRUB can’t find the kernel (as in the case where the kernel is on another filesystem) it should tell you it can’t find it and dump you back to the menu, to choose how to proceed with this new information. Ubuntu’s implementation of GRUB as one example includes a menu option to bring you to your UEFI configuration menu, where you may be able to an alternative bootloader program or boot from another storage medium. Of course none of these things are new-user or non-technical-user friendly. I do agree with you that these are poor user experiences, and that the low level user experience should be improved. But in certain cases - the half-boot example, this is actually very useful as a last resort troubleshooting stage. Now I can’t speak for all UEFI implementations because many are garbage and barely functional, but most decent implementations do allow you to delete bootloader entries from them either from the “bios” menu or via “efibootmgr” on a Linux live disk - that said, this doesn’t delete the partitions underneath An additional item of note is that most operating systems at install time treat themselves as first class citizens at best (Linux), or the only operating system to be installed on the machine (Windows). There isn’t likely to be much incentive for the developers to improve that.