Him going off on, like, Nash equilibriums, market forces, end of history, etc. like 2/3 into it was good.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I mean he praises EFI as being a modern BIOS replacement thingy with “features”, but I recall a bunch of complaints about EFI from Linux dev Matthew Garrett, which I don’t exactly remember in any detail, but it was extremely buggy shit when Linux first tried to support this and is definitely overengineered as fuck.
Probably the correct thing to replace the BIOS with would have been something actually way more minimal. On many ARM devices, for example, the built-in ROM basically just initializes the CPU (maybe not even fully?), serial interface (for debug logs) and whatever storage it needs to boot from. No USB, graphics, keyboard support or whatever. There it hopes to find a bootloader that is also just minimal enough to get Linux into RAM.
This way there’s only really one driver for almost all the hardware, the one inside your OS. EFI has it’s own drivers for all sorts of shit. These drivers are separate from the actual drivers your OS is going to use, which is duplicate effort and it causes problems and bugs.
If you really really want to have networking, keyboard, mouse, graphics or whatever before booting into your final OS, which I guess people might want to do, you could just use a stripped down version of (say) Linux, and have that act as a sort of BIOS replacement, and use that to chainload your real OS. That way you can just use the drivers inside Linux and people wouldn’t have to write special shitty EFI drivers which will just run for one second during boot. Which I think is the idea behind LinuxBIOS but I haven’t looked at that to closely.
If you want to see stripped down Linux, boy have I got good news for you! That’s pretty much exactly what they did back then. It was a lot slower than this, and still pretty pointless. See the previous episodes of that series, they’re pretty good.
