My newest laptop has Windows 8.1 Pro installed on a GPT disk with UEFI instead of BIOS. Of course, I'm not willing to use it as the only OS since I haven't run Windows as my primary in about 8 or 9 years now. I'm a big fan of Debian, but they are, of course, still stuck in 2010 and basically say about UEFI "it may work, may not, who knows".

So, is there any distros that are known to work with UEFI without jumping through hoops, installing a bootloader on a USB drive, chainloading, etc?

Thanks.

I would think any modern distro. The easier efi linux bootloader is elilo. You can also boot the kernel directly (without bootloader), if compiled with CONFIG_EFI_STUB, efi boot settings with efibootmgr.

Just give your fav Debian a try, I am sure it will work

No, it doesn't. I did actually try it. Doens't even register, Windows still boots directly.

Make sure you turn off secure boot.

I know Slackware works just fine. Partitioned it with cgdisk, run setup, reboot and that's it.

Ubuntu 14.4 "just works". Be sure to run the EFI mode installer.

When do you ever have to do any of those things? At worst you might have to run efibootmgr manually.

And yes, I second the "Slackware just works." At the end of the installation process you get the option to add Slackware to your EFI boot menu.

Otherwise, I would expect any up-to-date distro (Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu or any derivative) to have perfect EFI support.

Ubuntu and Fedora supposedly paid the microsoft tax and are signed with microsoft keys. And are probably the safest bets for UEFI usability. A lot of other distros are UEFI compliant, but there's a few manual and poorly documented steps needed to make it work. It might be well documented, but finding that magic cheat sheet that any noob can use probably isn't that easy. I tend to stick with USB bootable versions of linux on those systems and disable secure boot and enable CSM when I run linux on them. Although I tend to install linux on that usb medium on non-UEFI machines.

Secure boot was never turned on. I updated this to Windows 8 as I was given a free key, and decided it was time to try UEFI, which meant I had to go GPT also.

The reason I mention those things is many of the "how-to's" of getting Debian to dual-boot with Windows 8 suggests using these things. From what I gather from what I've read, grub-efi isn't available on the installation medium, so you have to use a roundabout way of booting it the first time, THEN install grub-efi.

I may look into Slack while I wait for Debian to get with the times.

This is actually my first time installing anything on a UEFI machine. As I'm looking to maybe get a new laptop sometime in the next few months (it's about time I get an ultrabook), and it'll come with Windows 8 (I still need Windows for my Star Wars mods since the base games will never get ported to linux), so figured might as well use my free key to try it out.

Here are my experiences setting up Slack with UEFI support:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...nd-4175506557/

Slackware has good UEFI support even with Grub.

My new test system I'm working on at the moment has a 1 TB HDD with this:

100MB /boot EXT4 - sda1
100MB EFI EF00 - sda2
8GB swap 8200 - sda3
250GB / JFS - sda4
Rest of disk space is reserved for FreeBSD, LFS, and Windows 8.1 pending their installations.

Bootloader currently is Grub.

I did some more searching, and found someone that made some experimental Wheezy install images that were EFI, trying to install from that now.

Discovered it has nothing to do with Debian afterall, it's HP. HP's UEFI is simply broken, and will not allow anything other than Windows to boot, regardless if you change the bootmanager with BCDedit, change with efibootmgr so that linux is the ONLY option, as soon as you reboot and the HP UEFI loads, it restores it to ONLY booting Windows on this laptop. Already have the latest firmware, so will have to go to legacy mode and reinstall everything.

Please post laptop model, it may be useful for future references

HP Elitebook 8470P

Try pressing 'F9' when it boots/POSTs and select Debian instead of Windoze. I believe the HP UEFI is crappy and outdated and you cannot set the default boot.
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Other-N...x/td-p/3001259