My only complaint ever about lilo was that you have to run lilo from the system with lilo installed, which makes having multiple kernels on the other OS's in a multiboot setup a pain and also you have to have the /boot partitions of those other OS's mounted so that the relative paths (as seen by the primary OS) can be read. It's less of a problem since I figured out how to use 'chroot' for this purpose, but the relative path thing is still a pain, especially when I have 4 or 5 OS's and I have to mount ALL those partitions to get lilo to pick them up. It's easy to screw up by mounting the wrong partiton to the mount point.

I think it's more likely that GRUB Legacy users will continue using GRUB Legacy as long as it supports their needs. If GRUB Legacy doesn't support something (at the moment) LILO probably doesn't either. That may not be the case if some newer file-systems are added to Linux that become popular. One that comes to mind but is uncertain is ZFS.

I have nothing against LILO. In fact I use LILO on some of my machines with Linux. LILO supports a nice boot screen for Slackware. It's just that GRUB works better for some of the others. I keep a GRUB boot disc just in case I have to boot something in an unusual situation. It's helpful when a Windows system's MBR is hosed as well and for loading stand-alone code written in assembly language.

I do agree that GRUB 2 is complicated. I don't understand why that was necessary to support adding file-systems in a modular way. I've always been a proponent of backward compatibility unless that severely limits improvements. There is something to be said for simplicity when that does the job. LILO deserves praise for not getting bloated with unnecessary features and for supporting Linux systems well on most hardware. I would much rather have LILO as the default boot loader than GRUB 2.

I also noticed the use of modules. For instance, if you want to chain load Windows, you have to insmod ntfs. You have to be aware of what file system the kernel resides in and insmod the appropriate module. In Grub legacy, this is done transparently.

The only "enhancement" that I see is the support of conditionals via Bash semantics. Conditional boot is something I have never needed.

GRUB 2 has a Rube Goldberg quality to it.

+1 and amen.