-<p>In theory, EFI implementations should provide boot managers. Unfortunately, in practice these boot managers are often so poor as to be useless. The worst I've personally encountered is on <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI,</a> which provides you with no boot options whatsoever, beyond choosing the boot device (hard disk vs. optical disc, for instance). I've heard of others that are just as bad. For this reason, a good EFI boot manager—either standalone or as part of a boot loader—is a practical necessity for multi-booting on an EFI computer. That's where rEFIt and rEFInd come into play.</p>
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+<p>In theory, EFI implementations should provide boot managers. Unfortunately, in practice these boot managers are often so poor as to be useless. The worst I've personally encountered is on <a href="http://www.rodsbooks.com/gb-hybrid-efi/">Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI,</a> which provides you with no boot options whatsoever, beyond choosing the boot device (hard disk vs. optical disc, for instance). I've heard of others that are just as bad. For this reason, a good EFI boot manager—either standalone or as part of a boot loader—is a practical necessity for multi-booting on an EFI computer. That's where rEFInd comes into play.</p>
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+<p>I decided to fork the earlier rEFIt project because, although rEFIt is a useful program, it's got several important limitations, such as poor control over the boot loader detection process and an ability to display at most a handful of boot loader entries on its main screen. Christoph Pfisterer, rEFIt's author, stopped updating rEFIt with version 0.14, which was released in March of 2010. Since I forked rEFIt to rEFInd, Christoph has begun pointing rEFIt users to rEFInd as a successor project.</p>
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+<p>As already noted, rEFInd is a boot manager for EFI and UEFI computers. (I use "EFI" to refer to either version unless the distinction is important.) You're likely to benefit from it on computers that boot multiple OSes, such as two or more of Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. You will <i>not</i> find rEFInd useful on older BIOS-based computers or on systems with other types of firmware, such as older PowerPC-based Macs. Prior to mid-2011, few computers outside of Intel-based Macs used EFI; but starting in 2011, computer manufacturers began adopting UEFI in droves, so most computers bought since then use EFI. Even so, many modern PCs support both EFI-style booting and BIOS-style booting, the latter via a BIOS compatibility mode that's known as the <i>Compatibility Support Module (CSM).</i> Thus, you may be using BIOS-style booting on an EFI-based computer. If you're unsure which boot method your computer uses, check the first of the subsections, <a href="bootmode.html">What's Your Boot Mode</a>.</p>