Re: UEFI boot... DO NOT!!
to make sure of easy maintenance etc, ALWAYS look for 'legacy boot'...
...and disable it.
UEFI is simpler and easier if you understand it. You can have multiple bootloaders installed at the same time and pick which one you want to use by name from the boot override menu or from the UEFI settings themselves. On GPT disks, there's no faffing about with extended and logical partitions, and GPT is more robust, with several copies of the partition table "just in case."
And, of course, you can use secure boot if you wish. If you don't want to, turn it off. I know it's popular to think it is some grand conspiracy to keep non-MS OSes off of people's PCs, but I run Linux with secure boot on with no issue at all. You can even set it to use your unsigned bootloader by marking it as trusted in the UEFI settings, and it will generate a hash of the bootloader, store that in NVRAM, and compare that to the generated hash at each boot-- the same thing that happens with a signed bootloader, but in effect, you're signing it. UEFI doesn't care if it is a Linux, Windows, or any other kind of bootloader... it works with all of them.
I loathe MS as much as the next Linux user, but if this is a conspiracy to keep Linux off, they did a damned poor job of it. It's no more of a hassle installing and using Linux with secure boot enabled than it is to use Windows. But if you're still not convinced, you can turn it off. And on any device that is so locked down that you can't turn secure boot off, you're not going to be doing any legacy booting anyway. If you encounter such a thing, just avoid it!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
