Comment by tenebrisalietum

IIRC Microsoft was instrumental with a few other companies in developing the rather arcane and overbearing ACPI standard in the 90's that continues to make it difficult for non-Windows operating systems to reliably work with a laptop's hardware even today.

I've played with U-Boot on ARM platforms. It's a breath of fresh air. It loads the OS and then just gets out of the way. This is what simplified PC firmware should be.