rEFInd Alternatives

rEFInd

rEFInd is a fork of the rEFIt boot manager for computers based on the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and Unified EFI (UEFI). Like rEFIt, rEFInd is a boot manager, meaning that it presents a menu of options to the user when the computer first starts up, as shown below. rEFInd is not a boot loader, which is a program that loads an OS kernel and hands off control to it.

I decided to fork the earlier rEFIt project because, although rEFIt is a useful program, it's got several important limitations, such as poor control over the boot loader detection process and an ability to display at most a handful of boot loader entries on its main screen. rEFIt's author, Christoph Pfisterer, didn't respond to my e-mails, and the latest official version of rEFIt, 0.14, was released in March of 2010. Thus, it appears that rEFIt has been abandoned. Forking the project to give rEFIt new features seemed like the thing to do.