EFI partition in Linux mint MATE on non UEFI BIOS

Question

So I just installed Linux mint MATE(install along side windows(7)) on my old laptop. Its an MBR without UEFI BIOS. When I headed over to the disks program after the installation I was shocked to see a /boot/efi partition created, partition type was(W95 FAT32). Is this normal or have I messed up? Till now its just working fine I even ran the update manager and it was happy after a reboot. Will this create problems long term? Should I reinstall or let it be?

Output for some commands which might be useful:

[ -d /sys/firmware/efi ] && echo "Installed in UEFI mode" || echo "Installed in Legacy mode"
installed in Legacy mode

cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.

#

# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a

# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices

# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).

#

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>

# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation

UUID=a4b92403-da07-45b9-a227-e2647a5bb4ab / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1

# /boot/efi was on /dev/sda3 during installation

UUID=BDA1-AF68 /boot/efi vfat umask=0077 0 1

/swapfile none swap sw 0 0

And right now its showing a 20.3(una) update will I be fine doing that now?

Sorry for the bad image :(

Answer 1

SuSE has decided to set up both legacy and UEFI boot methods on all new installations, in anticipation that any legacy systems may eventually get migrated to newer UEFI-capable, UEFI-default or even UEFI-only hardware. Also, Intel originally planned to start leaving out the legacy BIOS support on new systems in early 2020s, although the COVID pandemic and the worldwide chip shortage may have caused that plan to be re-evaluated.

At first glance, it might seem that Mint might have chosen to do something similar, but it turns out that it is considered to be an installer bug: https://github.com/linuxmint/linuxmint/issues/312

If /boot/efi is an empty partition, there should be no problem in deleting it. If you want to be absolutely sure, first just comment it out of /etc/fstab and reboot to confirm that its removal will have no impact.