Comparison of bootloaders

Obviously NM is an easier solution for a wider range of users. Imagine some random person with a laptop trying to connect to some network using “pro” commands in terminal each time he or she moves to different locations during a day. It’s nowhere near Manjaro’s motto “Enjoy the simplicity” right?

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Ahhh okay, for those cases NM is currently the easier solution yes.
But for Desktop, eg. static as in staying at one spot, machines it doesn’t make any difference.
(The reason i keep NM aside is exactly what you pointed out, though i never connect to any nearby WiFi)
See this reply, for a combination i use…

Yeah, so many conversations are limited with what people use and can think of.

For instance, someone here mentioned that rEFInd can detect EFI loaders (including kernels). But that is also true for systemd-boot. A properly generated (not a rocket science) unified kernel image put in $esp/EFI/Linux is easily detectable by systemd-boot. This is the way I boot my Manjaro machine.

BTW this thread lacks some examples of awesome implementations of systemd-boot in other distros, let me give you a link to one used by Pop!_OS:

I still prefer sbupdate and dracut cause both are able to auto-generate a bootable image comprised of [kernel + initrd + osinfo + cmdline] singed with Secure Boot key to use it for a real full disk encryption case. All they need is some hooks and cmdline configs, just like Grub.

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Looks like the end result is about same as i did in the script i mentioned here: Comparison of bootloaders - #10 by TriMoon (A few replies back)
Although the name of it is awkward imho, because who would have thought it was about a bootloader configurator?
(I personally thought it was some kind of real stub like SHIM, according to its name)

But yea at moment each and every distro uses it’s own methods at moment to implement things.
Hope this thread will aid in making a unified distro-agnostic one for all :grin:

There’s also another way not involving any loaders at all, I mean using just Linux kernel stub feature alone:
sudo efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -L "Manjaro 5.4 splash" -l /vmlinuz-5.4-x86_64 -u ' ro quiet splash initrd=\intel-ucode.img initrd=\initramfs-5.4-x86_64.img apparmor=1 security=apparmor audit=0 nouveau.noaccel=1 root=UUID=4c74074d-5543-4bea-89a2-0f96a039ccfe rootfstype=ext4 resume=UUID=4c74074d-5543-4bea-89a2-0f96a039ccfe resume_offset=6762496' -v

Hope there’s no need to explain each and every option in the command. Only one note: this is for a traditional way of booting using separate files for kernel and initrds, however, it may be easily adopted for a unified image as well.

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I know but that actually is using the UEFI loader to pass the kernel options, via NVRAM, which is by it’s own also a bootloader :wink:

I’m not that into technical details but what UEFI loader are you referring to? In the example above, the kernel itself is a loader.

The Mainboards UEFI implementation in it’s BIOS…

Ah right. The same thing that passes control to Grub or systemd-boot or rEFInd. So no need to focus attention on it I suppose.

Exactly :clap:

POP OS and Clear Linux with focus on performance are using systemd-boot.
Although Clear Linux is frowned as it’s developed by Intel but there’s clear :stuck_out_tongue: difference in performance.

The difference in performance is minimal for PCs they are aimed at. They are using systemd-boot for another reasons: they don’t care about old systems w/o UEFI and they prefer simplicity over tonnes of functionality.

That’s live, it reminds me of the battle between Intel vs AMD, or VHS vs Betamax …
Sometimes availability wins over quality, although in this case quality got the upperhand boost with availability as backup it seems if Intel has started using systemd :smiley:

Yes, no homed please.

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Just wait till someone finds a way to put your home dir in the cloud encrypted and all :stuck_out_tongue:
Just kidding (or am i?), it’s just too new yet…

Imagine having your Steam library in the cloud.

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That would be horrible.

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This is exactly what the conversation was missing, thanks! :blush:

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… and that is exactly the issue some people have with systemd. It tries to do everything, unless of course I am mistaken in the concept and purposes of systemd :wink:

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if you listen the systemd dev it’s exactly what it do… it do ONE things and do it well… it solve all issue of other tools… :wink:

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