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Add to SafariWhen comparing Grub2 vs rEFInd, the Slant community recommends rEFInd for most people. In the question“What are the best boot loaders/managers?” rEFInd is ranked 1st while Grub2 is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose rEFInd is:
REFInd is really good with automatically with finding your operating systems, leaving all that manual configuration as totally optional.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to install and setup
Only requires 2 commands most of the time (i.e. grub-install ... and grub-mkconfig ...).
Pro Support for a large number of Operating Systems
Grub can load a large number of operating systems, not just Linux.
Pro Easily locates a kernel file
Grub is very file-system aware. This way, it can easily locate a kernel file which is residing in the file system without having to specify a logical-sector.
Pro Has an interactive CLI
Grub has an interactive command line interface which can be very helpful at times if anything goes wrong during the boot process, especially after a fresh install or after a kernel update.
Pro Supports BIOS
Has BIOS support unlike other bootloaders which only support efi or uefi.
Pro Automatic kernel discovery
REFInd is really good with automatically with finding your operating systems, leaving all that manual configuration as totally optional.
Pro Beautiful theme support
REFInd allows easy theming with fonts, icons and backgrounds to give you a customized and beautiful graphical bootloader.
Pro EFI only
Focuses on one type of system.
Pro Text based configs
It can be configured with text files.
Pro Easy to install, easy command
Pro Hard
Cons
Con Slower boot times
Grub has slower boot times than most other bootloaders.
Con Fully-featured also means harder to wrap your head around
Grub has a lot of features that other boot loaders may not have. But this also means more time spent on the documentation if you want to know the ins and outs of it.
Con EFI only
REFInd supports only EFI or UEFI systems which, while common on the latest systems, is a relatively new technology. BIOS-based systems are not supported.
Con Buggy mouse support
