> Look at Apple and Microsoft's bootloaders, they are dead simple and have barely changed in 20 years, it makes you wonder how the hell grub was even conceived.

> Look at Apple and Microsoft's bootloaders, they are dead simple and have barely changed in 20 years, it makes you wonder how the hell grub was even conceived. It has config files for config files. It's the GRand Unified Bootloader. The point was to have a single thing that could boot any configuration of any operating system on any platform. It can boot Ubuntu on ARM. It can boot Solaris on SPARC. It can boot Windows on x86_64. Encrypted, RAIDed, from your choice of firmware, on whatever filesystem(s) are around, netboot, reboot, multiboot, you name it, GRUB can do it. And to some degree yes that means it has to be more complicated than eg. BOOTMGR that's only meant to launch one OS and really only wants to do it one way. That said... I do think GRUB 2 really piled on more complexity than was needed; GRUB 0.99 was IMHO essentially the same features but way easier to configure. But even there, I get the appeal of scripting everything to be automagical. I disapprove, but I get it.