Clover Bootloader vs rEFInd

Clover Bootloader starts macOS, Windows and Linux systems on Macs and PCs with UEFI or BIOS firmware. It can launch through UEFI directly or use CloverEFI to emulate UEFI, and supports UEFI and legacy boot modes. Its graphical interface can be customized with themes, icons, fonts, backgrounds, animations and mouse pointers. Users can create boot entries for other operating systems, while the interface can save preboot logs, screenshots and OEM ACPI tables for diagnostics. Settings are held in an XML config.plist file in EFI/CLOVER. When firmware Secure Boot is enabled, Clover’s Secure setting limits booting to signed binaries. The repository links to a separate theme manager and theme collection, and its README points users to AppleLife, InsanelyMac and macos86.it forums. Build procedures are provided for macOS and Ubuntu 19.10. Clover incorporates OpenCorePkg libraries for kext injection and patching. It is free under the BSD 2-Clause License, which permits source and binary redistribution. The releases page lists version 5175 as latest, with six assets.

rEFInd is a free boot manager, forked from rEFIt, that scans for boot loaders and lets users select an operating system or utility at startup. It is intended for EFI-based computers, not older BIOS-based machines, and works with EFI 1.1 and UEFI 2.x. It can find EFI loaders, BIOS/CSM/legacy loaders, and boot options saved in firmware NVRAM. For Linux, rEFInd can detect kernels with EFI stub support, locate initrd files, and read kernel options from a refind_linux.conf file. It supports text and graphical operation, with configurable resolution, backgrounds, icons, and fonts. It can communicate with Shim to authenticate boot loaders using valid UEFI Secure Boot keys, Shim keys, or Machine Owner Keys. Included filesystem drivers cover ext2/3, ext4, Btrfs, ReiserFS, HFS+, and ISO-9660; the NTFS driver is not compiled by default. Downloads include ZIP, RPM, Debian, CD-R image, and USB flash drive image packages. Installation scripts and manual procedures cover Linux, macOS, and Windows. The maker describes it as beta-quality, with uneven testing across architectures.