Products · Product
UEFI
Raised as a usability problem by 21 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2013–2026), in 20 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Building a bootable image is much harder for UEFI than BIOSUnreviewed
20132026- UEFI network boot is hard to use; disk images must be split into filesystem pieces2025-11-19
- Building a bootable image for UEFI is much harder than for BIOS2021-10-29
- Hard to install Linux on new machines because of UEFI2016-12-06
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 21 complaints
- Network boot downloads bootloaders at a snail's pace and shows very technical screens2026-06-12
- Error messages give almost no information to debug boot failures2026-06-12
- UEFI network boot is hard to use; disk images must be split into filesystem pieces2025-11-19
- Choosing an OS at boot requires spamming hotkeys, slow loading, and hunting through submenus2025-06-20
- Enrolling custom Secure Boot keys is far more complicated than necessary2023-12-08
- Unclear how MokManager works and not sure what it manages2023-03-10
- Must interrupt normal boot with Esc and pick GRUB entry manually2023-02-16
- 1000+ settings with no explanation of what each means, confusing for ordinary users2022-07-08
- Dark blue text is hard to read on a black background, forcing squinting2022-02-27
- Building a bootable image for UEFI is much harder than for BIOS2021-10-29
- Enabling Secure Boot involves many hidden steps and the setup experience is horrendously bad2021-07-18
- Bad BIOS setting locks user out with no way to recover2021-04-01
- Configuring Secure Boot is so complex that security tools are hard to use2020-09-24
- Developers must ask teammates how to get projects booting because the docs are hard to follow2020-08-16
- Choosing an OS at boot means spamming a function key and navigating many BIOS menus2020-04-02
- After power loss, laptop wouldn't boot; fixing needed obscure manual secure boot steps2019-10-10
- Installing a second OS alongside Windows breaks booting, requiring manual recovery steps and reinstalls2017-11-19
- Simple gotchas with implicit behavior take a week to figure out; docs are weak2017-10-21
- Hard to install Linux on new machines because of UEFI2016-12-06
- No easy way to reset firmware settings to defaults, so a corrupted machine may not boot2016-02-01
- Some OEM PCs make secure boot almost impossible to figure out how to turn off2013-02-14