Well, when EFI started it was so screwed up that pretty much everything had to be done in that EFI shell (the classic bios screen did very little in the early systems). That was 2002-2003 (or before), and it has taken so long for EFI to take over is because of how badly the first implementations were back then. Telling everyone EFI was the future and making it one big dumpster fire did not do it any favors. It might have been what sometimes gets done with agile. Get something so bad out the door that by the time you fix it all of your customers have left your product and are never coming back (unless of course your competition is equally inept). And having used that shell back then, it was poorly documented and really felt more like old MSDOS and unix thrown together (but rewritten just enough to confuse everyone who knew either). The Itanium systems used it, and enable/disabling pci cards to boot or not and looking for disks attached to the controller, and setting the disk to boot had to be done in there. There was at the time a 60+ page document from the vendor on how to debug when a machine lost track of its boot device. I think whoever wrote it thought that it could do everything possible (unlike the bios) but they seemed to have no idea that really there were not that many settings people really wanted to change, and with EFI doing the basic settings was not easy. With a bios you can fumble through and find and examine all of the settings possible. With EFI there was no chance of fumbling around and every figuring it out. It likely had a good place if they had just put it as an option in the normal bios for use in emergencies, and not expected to be needed for normal usage. So, the real question is not if ordinary users can use it, but if even power users can use it. I think it was beyond power/system admin users even, without an explicitly recipe delivered from a vendor. It was in general just too complicated and really once you figure out what you want to do then it was a major pain to do even when you had a recipe. And the recipes we got from the vendor (the vendor it questions was were later reviewed by said vendor and determined to be needlessly ugly to do anyway (there is significant ways to simplify what they gave us), so even the engineer's at the vendor that wrote EFI did not really know how to make it work decently early on. On Fri, Dec 24, 2021 at 5:00 PM Tom Horsley <horsley1953(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > > I recently got a new mini PC that is UEFI only. Out of curiosity > I started reading about the EFI shell. I now have only one > question: Would any "ordinary" user ever have any reason to > use the EFI shell? (Secondary question: Would he be able to > anyway?) > > Trying to decrypt the things I read I got the impression that > the first thing they did was invent all new jargon to prove > it is nothing like BIOS, then write cryptic descriptions of things > you can't understand without first learning all the new jargon :-). > _______________________________________________ > users mailing list -- users(a)lists.fedoraproject.org > To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave(a)lists.fedoraproject.org > Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ > List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines > List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org > Do not reply to spam on the list, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure