Can anybody explain why people like UEFI?

[Phillip McCleod]

1. i don't know if i *like* uefi but as a mac user..

running an efi machine dual-boot might take some extra care and software (rEFIt) but i will say that i burn through linux distributions for fun but this is the same exact installation of os x that came with my machine years back. rock solid. always boots no matter what horrible *nix-y things i do to the rest of my hdd. toss 'fink', osxfuse and ext2fuse in there and suddenly they'll even talk to each other.. awkwardly true but enough for osx to be a safety net. need to download and burn a new disk because i goofed and broke linux irreparably? at a coffee shop? no problem. i can even get to the iso on the linux partition.

more generally and as a tech i will say i'm looking forward to the bygone days of bios. i don't like having to remember if it's f2 or f12 or f1 or esc on an hp or dell or acer or.. there's better things to store in that part of my brain. i think a *little* standardization isn't a *bad* thing. it gave us ascii and ansi.. and the internet.

last point in defense of uefi. a quote..

http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/The-30-year-long-Reign-of-BIOS-is-Over-Why-UEFI-Will-Rock-Your/ba-p/198

BIOS was developed in 1979 and is far beyond out-of-date. Its limited execution space (1024 Kbytes!) and its limited number of addressable devices causes more and more problems in today’s architecture. Your IT systems need to handle an increasing amount of devices. BIOS will fail you at some point – it will simply deny handling the device or may even cause problems in an OS environment.

Speaking of devices: Thanks to today’s vast number of USB ports, PCI devices, or built-in controllers (none of which existed 20-30 years ago), BIOS struggles with initializing them one-by-one. This struggle results in delays of up to 30 seconds before the actual operating system start its first boot sequence!

Furthermore, the BIOS is physically unable to boot from hard disks with more than 2.1 TB. Back in the 80s, that kind of capacity seemed like a fairy tale, but we are being ushered into an era of hard disks with multiple terabytes of disk space.