I'm shutting up now, because this comment from ngompa is, IMO, very well/thoroughly said. thx Neal!
On 4/6/22 8:16 AM, Neal Gompa wrote:
If you really have a need to reinstall such machine, you'll take the F36 image and upgrade to F37+ and you should still be good.
This is not a deprecation change, this is effectively a removal change. By removing the packages and the tooling support for legacy BIOS, it makes several scenarios (including recovery) harder. Moreover, it puts the burden on people to figure out if their hardware can boot and install Fedora when we clearly haven't reached a critical mass yet for doing so, like we did when we finally removed the i686 kernel build.
I'm personally a fan of using UEFI instead of BIOS. Heck, I implemented support for UEFI in Fedora's cloud images when other people told me it was not possible, while preserving BIOS support. I've been trying to figure out the roadmap for BIOS deprecation for a year now, and the reason *I* didn't propose a Change yet is because I have not sufficiently determined that it was reasonable to do so.
I'm particularly upset about this Change because it feels like a hostage change where the proposal owners blithely ignore what we're saying as unimportant or irrelevant and abuse our principles to do things that are clearly against what the community feels is right.
I have been trying in the background for years to try to figure out solutions for usability problems in Fedora Linux on UEFI because *I want our experience to be good there*. But it's extremely hard when:
- Bugs and feature requests around UEFI related features are ignored
- The packages are locked down so there is no way for the community to help
- At various times, people have explicitly said "patches NOT welcome"
I'm angry because we're doing this without any real thought around the consequences for the user experience, and we should not do that as a premier Linux distribution.