Plop Boot Manager vs rEFInd

Plop Boot Manager is a free program for starting different operating systems from hard disk, floppy, CD/DVD, USB, or network. Its built-in USB driver can boot USB devices without BIOS USB boot support, and its IDE CD/DVD driver can start optical media without BIOS support. Installation can place it in the hard disk's first sectors before the first partition, avoiding the need for an extra partition. It can launch from LILO, Syslinux, GRUB, GRUB4DOS, GRUB2, Windows boot.ini, or Windows BCD; it can also start over a network with PXELINUX or be stored as a BIOS option ROM. Configuration includes operating system profiles, up to 16 partitions, partition hiding, a boot countdown, and text or graphical interfaces. Password protection covers the computer and its setup. The maker says it can access USB hard disks up to 2 TB even where BIOS has a 128 GiB limit. It is free for personal and commercial use, but may not be sold. The listed release is 5.0.15, dated 2013-04-15. When started from plpbt.bin rather than installed to the MBR, settings cannot be saved.

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.