What's brilliant about OC / Dortania is precisely its liability: It demystifies an essential base layer of contemporary PC, and gets users involved. This is also a limit, because after doing the work of the configurator yourself, the first thing you want is an organizer for all that config.
But we arrive here because there is a contradiction between ownership of a centralized configurator and the freedom of configuration.
By producing and supporting OC the door is opened for involvement in what typically would be one more monetized silo of control.
I'm distressed to find that Ubuntu Ubiquity (the Canonical installer$) is not respectful of ESP / OC at all and will thump it on drives unrelated to the Ubuntu target drive. It is respectful of MSFT.
Also odd the Apple always creates an ESP but maybe only ever puts diags in there?
The hackintosh scene is a very strange zone, like Linux meets macOS across a maginot line (i don't mean a literal comparison of ww2 France / Germany but a barrier with obscure strength of dimensions overcome by wiliness.
If I were Apple I might even quietly support the scene because if diffuses discontentment with a necessary but seemingly draconian abdication of support, while not really hurting—and maybe justifying—long-term efforts to completely seal their stack.
Regardless of the preposterousness of the above statement, more user awareness of what's going on at preboot is a good thing for Mac serviceability in this era and it opens up thinking to questioning reigning assumptions of ownership of the stack, especially MSFT who are happy to seize the whole thing for their purity programs. Paradoxically, Apple is of less concern to me because they build their own world soup to nuts and one of the privileges of building your own world is designing it how you like it. MSFT like Republicans exploit a commons while pretending to be democratic only so far as it suits them.
Linux has to be a key part of the future of personal computing so to extent that Mac nerdz come to appreciate its freedoms while Apple locks itself away in its pretty garden is not a big deal. Apple will prosper on its merits. MSFT prospers according to its exploitations.
It ridiculous and absurd to me to see Windows denigrating its own legacy of Internet Explorer and telling its customers to run away from that trash-heap of a browser in favor of MSFTs bold new invention of ... Google Chrome!
Weird, but signs of the times.
