I recently set up a Manjaro partition on my Dell laptop, running Windows 11 on the other partition. Currently, it’s kind of a hassle to change between the two as I have to manually edit the settings in BIOS. There needs to be a specific set of settings for Windows to run, and same for Manjaro. Is there a way to set up some sort of nice GUI where I can just click which I want to boot and it will automatically change the settings?
The settings you are referring to belong to the UEFI firmware of your machine, which should be regarded as a separate operating system that runs until you select one of the installed operating systems via said installed operating systems’ own boot loaders — these boot loaders are themselves UEFI executables, as extensions to the UEFI firmware.
It is only upon choosing an operating system by way of the operating system’s own boot loader that the installed operating system takes over from the UEFI, with the exception of low-level UEFI routines that run in the background, in a specialized high-privilege mode of the processor (cores) that the installed operating systems do not have access to.
The only potential workaround I see — but I have no direct experience with this — would be to run one of the operating systems inside a fully virtualized environment whereby one can emulate even the machine’s UEFI and its settings.
It is very easy to set up and supports pretty much any OS you can imagine. There is a nice, simple GUI to select the OS you want to boot, and many different themes are available so you can customize it however you like.
I am assuming they are switching between different boot options in the BIOS menu, depending on which OS they want to run. I did the same thing for a while because I had a distro installed that for some reason grub would not add to the grub menu even though OS prober was detecting it. It’s super annoying as OP mentioned.
Reading through it again I see you are probably right–my bad!
I don’t mean to double-down on rEFInd boot manager here, but if it is a secure boot thing and you want a nice easy GUI solution you can look into setting up a shim, as described here: Managing EFI Boot Loaders for Linux: Dealing with Secure Boot
This may be odd one but possibly you can save different bios profiles?
Still the hassle to switch but easier than edit the settings manually.
Just a thought