Best (easy) boot loader for manjaro?

Support
1

hey there,

the “possible” breakage of grub in some of the updates this year is giving me anxiety and it is also very annoying*.

So I was wondering, which is the best, i.e. hassle free boot loader for manjaro?

I have just manjaro installed.

Thx and happy holidays.

* During the 2025-08-11 update, I thought I did everything right, it still broke. Then I changed some UEFI settings and I could boot into manjaro again. Didn’t touch grub since, but it definitely doesn’t feel safe.

2

There is no such thing as best and easiest - it depends on your system and your skills.

If your system is BIOS/MBR then there is very few alternatives - syslinux is one - but I don’t regard that one as easy - perhaps because I never used it.

If your system is modern UEFI based system.

In my personal opinion - using a unified kernel - and fairly easy to convert.

But if you want to change as little as possible

  • the system has bios mode disabled (CSM or compatibility mode)
  • the system is NOT encrypted
  • rEFInd can boot the kernel directly
  • it also handles booting different EFI based operating systems

It is as simple as

sudo pacman -Syu refind
sudo refind-install

Done

3 Likes
3

I can personally vouch for rEFInd, having used it for well over a decade. Once installed, it becomes the initial UEFI boot manager and effectively chainloads Grub. Grub remains managed by the OS itself, but as @linux-aarhus suggests, there is also an option offerred which bypasses Grub completely, and boots via the kernel stub.

rEFInd is configured from one file – the defaults are quite sane.

In fact, it’s likely all that you might want to change is the timeout and the theme. The file is well documented behind # comments.

sudo nano /boot/efi/EFI/refind/refind.conf

You will find links to some rEFInd themes toward the end of this related tutorial:

Regards.