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Many years ago I followed the trend like a good little sheep and switched from lilo to grub. At the time I guess I was happy with it because I was 15 an the boot loader was a little prettier.
After grub 2.0 was released I decided I hated grub and it was needlessly complicated. I want back to lilo.
I've recently seen a lot of posts about this rEFind boot manager, which looks very visually impressive, however I can only imagine it being a giant headache.
So here is my question. I don't duel boot, but I recompile my kernel a lot so I generally have lots of kernels. Pretty screens are nice but 99% of the time I'd rather just boot and not even see the boot loader.
Lilo, has one command (once it's set up) and one config file which is generally only a few lines.
Can anyone give me a compelling argument why any other boot loader is better?
At one time it was about the only thing in town. Some technical issues and grub forced it into seclusion. I guess some other people took it over and updated it.
There are places for direct and fast and maybe some argument for some of the features of grub/grub2/grub4dos/grub4nt.
Personally, I'll take LILO over rEFind any day. IMO, Boot Manager without it being a Boot Loader also makes it useless. I don't need pretty, I need functional. I do prefer Grub to LILO, but only because I've gotten used to it. Either/or, long as it works.
I tried grub somewhere around 2005 with Mandriva out of curiosity - never got it to work and hosed my MBR. At the time I was able to recover by reverting to lilo.
I guess it is whatever you are used to as Timothy_Miller said, but I favor simplicity over the various alternatives every time.
I used lilo for a while, then switched to GRUB1 because it had more features and you have a command line when you boot just in case. Then I switched back to lilo when I moved to 64-bit because GRUB1 didn't support it. I'm still using lilo, but may move to GRUB2 if I see a real reason or benefit to it. GRUB2 has only become the default bootloader for many distros only recently.
I like lilo a lot but grub2 has some nice features boot from md raid/lvm, boot from iso file, gpt support. That are the main reasons I switched to grub2.
I find it quite amusing that one of the main arguments against Lilo form Grub users was "But you have to run lilo after changing the configuration!" and now, with Grub 2 you have to do the same.
Anyways, I like those botloaders where I don't have to write a script for configuration: Lilo, Grub Legacy and Sys/Ext/Isolinux. I never looked into rEFINd, but I still hadn't the time to switch to UEFI on my systems.
Functional but simple enough that the commands are easy to remember. Yes it is agonizing having to type an extra four letter word every single time I upgrade my kernel... sigh..... but I suppose I can deal
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