Rant: Why is UEFI still so bad?

2023-08-29

In case you don't know, I use an ASUS motherboard and I've used Gigabyte and MSI boards too in the past. One problem they all have in common is the BIOS or UEFI menu. It's always awful, and I'm going to talk about why that is.

What's English?

If you've built a PC in the past you're no doubt familiar with this. Somehow consumers spend far too much money on sometimes high-end motherboards and despite that, they cannot even be bothered to pay competent people to translate the text to English.

The end result is you get spelling mistakes at best and hilarious translation errors that can lead to the user not comprehending what the option in the BIOS ACTUALLY does. I've encountered this issue on all motherboards I've ever had, but they seem to be less common with prebuilt PCs.

The year is 2023. Fix your fucking translations when people pay far too much for your god damn product.

The menu is always a buggy mess

I'm sure other motherboards have different issues, and maybe I just got unlucky or something, but here is an incomplete list of issues I've had with my ASUS board so far.

• Ignores my keyboard input when starting up, so the end result is I cannot enter the UEFI menu or boot menu.
• Randomly decides it doesn't want to post until I reboot the machine MANY times and wait 10 or more minutes.
• Removes boot entries every once in a while for absolutely no reason.
• VT-d and XMP disable themselves
• Claims to have overheated despite being completely idle with good temperatures.

You may be yelling "UPDATE YOUR BIOS!!!" right now, and I did update it recently. It fixed a few of these issues but it still ignores my keyboard input, still decides to not post for seemingly no reason and still removes boot entries.

The lack of quality control is very clear. Besides, you shouldn't expect consumers to update their BIOS because you couldn't be bothered to write firmware that isn't garbage. Updating is risky, because if you lose power or something, you're fucked.

Options are impossible to find

Not much I need to say, but if you've ever used a modern UEFI menu you know how difficult it is to find basic features. There's always stupid gamer aesthetics and junk that makes it impossible to find what you're looking for.

Options are hidden away in categories that sometimes make absolutely no sense. Not to mention, on my specific board on boot it will tell me the key to get into the UEFI menu, but it will not tell me what key to press to get into the boot menu. So unless you search it up or read the manual you will have no idea.

You could argue that this isn't necessary, but in that case why would they display the key to enter the UEFI at all?

What about prebuilt PCs?

Those are the problems with most BIOSes, or at least the problems I could think of. That said, most of them don't apply to prebuilt PCs.

Prebuilt PCs have other issues, such as lacking features. Yeah, instead of having pretty much too many features leading to confusion, prebuilt PCs often lack what I would consider essential features. But at least the menus are usually simple, don't have a bunch of bloat, and as such seem to be a lot more stable.

Source