// the pitch
Why Visor
An honest case — including where it loses.
The pitch
Boot managers make you choose between power and polish. GRUB can boot anything but drags a scripting language, generated configs, and a very 1998 menu along with it. systemd-boot is clean and minimal but plain, and only launches EFI binaries. rEFInd looks good and detects everything, but is a larger, older codebase configured through many moving parts. Visor's bet: you can have the polish and stay minimal — one small binary, one plain config file (or none), and a menu that looks like it belongs on hardware made this decade.
Head to head
| Visor | GRUB 2 | systemd-boot | rEFInd | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Footprint on ESP | ~340 KB, single binary | Several MB + modules + config machinery | ~100 KB + BLS entries | ~500 KB + icons/themes |
| Configuration | One plain-text file — or zero config with auto-detection | Generated grub.cfg via scripts; hand-editing discouraged | Simple, but one file per boot entry (BLS) | One file, many options; auto-detects too |
| Menu | Graphical: animations, blur, wallpaper accent colors, mouse/touch, themes | Text menu (themable with effort) | Text only, deliberately | Graphical icons; static, no animation |
| Boot methods | EFI-stub/UKI, raw kernels (handover), any EFI chainload | Everything, including legacy BIOS and multiboot | EFI binaries only | EFI binaries + legacy kernels via drivers |
| Auto cmdline for detected kernels | Yes — UKI section / fstab / GPT partition type | n/a (scripted at install time) | No (entries must specify) | Partial — refind_linux.conf generated at install, fstab guess |
| Live USB hotplug in the menu | Yes, animated add/remove | No | No | No (rescan on restart of the menu) |
| Btrfs snapshot boot | Built in (snapper/Timeshift/plain) | Via grub-btrfs add-on | No | No |
| Encrypted boot files on the ESP | Built in (VISORENC + one-password LUKS handoff) | Can read LUKS-encrypted /boot | No | No |
| Secure Boot | shim/SHIM_LOCK aware; sbctl signing in installer | Mature shim integration | Mature (sd-boot + shim) | Works with shim/MOK |
| Legacy BIOS | No — UEFI only | Yes | No | No |
| Scripting | None, on purpose | Full shell-like language | None | None |
| Maturity | Young (2026), one maintainer | 25+ years, huge ecosystem | Systemd project, widely deployed | 15+ years, well established |
Strengths
- Small and fast. A single ~340 KB binary, menu on screen in about a second, no supporting runtime to break.
- Zero-config is a real mode. Delete boot.conf and it still finds Windows, UKIs, and kernels — and derives a correct
root=cmdline, btrfs flags included. - The menu is genuinely nice. Double-buffered, animated, mouse-aware, blur, wallpaper-matched accent palette, themes. Boot screens don't have to look like a BIOS.
- Modern features built in, not bolted on: snapshot booting, OSTree deployment browsing, live USB hotplug, encrypted boot artifacts with a single-password LUKS chain.
- Debuggable by design. Every fallible step logs one line to
boot.log, and failures land in a recovery console instead of a black screen. - No scripting = no scripting attack surface, no config generators, no magic.
- Two architectures (x86_64, AArch64) from one tree, with RISC-V on the roadmap.
Weaknesses — the honest list
- UEFI only. No legacy BIOS, no multiboot. If you need those, GRUB is the answer.
- Young project, single maintainer. GRUB and rEFInd have decades of firmware-quirk scar tissue; Visor's real-hardware test matrix is growing release by release, largely from user reports.
- Non-FAT volumes need drivers. Kernels on ext4/btrfs are only visible after installing an EfiFs driver (one command, but a step GRUB doesn't need).
- ASCII-only UI text — entry names in CJK/Cyrillic won't render (the baked font covers ASCII).
- No network boot, and none planned currently.
- Secure Boot chains are manual today — sign-everything automation is the top roadmap item.
Fair summary: if you want a bulletproof do-everything loader, use GRUB. If you want the absolute minimum, systemd-boot. Visor is for people who want a fast, small, modern-looking menu with the conveniences built in — and who run UEFI hardware from this decade.
The project, in numbers
Figures as of July 2026 — live counts on the GitHub repository. The project started on June 13, 2026 and reached 500+ stars in its first six weeks. Development is one maintainer (IO-ZetZor) plus an active circle of issue reporters whose real-hardware logs have driven much of the hardening — v1.2.1 alone closed five user-reported issues from Acer and Ubuntu machines.