Regarding Grub
Manjaro is not Arch but we adopt a lot of what Arch Linux is doing. One of it is how grub gets installed similar to Arch. I already spoke about that last time when a config change in grub-git made systems using luks-encryption unbootable as shown here in detail.
Here is why
We normally install grub once via our installer Calamares and forget about it. The best thing is even to put grub to your ignore list of packages you want to update, as actually you never update grub which is booting your system! We never touch your grub install on MBR/EFI. Also Arch is not doing that. If you check Ubuntu or OpenSuse, their post-install scripts have a long list of detection cycles to figure out how grub was installed. When we add encryption to it it gets even harder to figure out. So we went the easy way for us to let the user remember how he installed it. Guess what: the user don’t know cos he never installed grub to begin with: our installer Calamares did that for him when he installed the OS the first time.
What we do to prevent unbootable systems
Well, we have for example update-grub script, which actually updates the grub menu, but NOT the grub on MBR/EFI. The last workaround was to mitigate the issue we had with luks encryption on older installs. Btw. luks encryption is rarely tested or non-tested at all. Same goes for XFS, which might have similar issues for other reasons.
Another way is to point the user to our Wiki when things go downhill to give the user a chance to fix the issue themselves.
Why the topic is now a topic again?
The second post is a wiki post. So any user who has TL2 rights can add some advice to that post. Since I started the post, everybody thinks I wrote that advice there. When I originally put the troubleshoots on there, there was no mention about grub at all. More or less your system will boot even you only update the package only. We normally check outdated grub installs on MBR/EFI if they break and add scripts to fix them, if needed. If you check the Arch announcements, they mentioned to reinstall grub as needed. Back then we had that EFI firmware loop issue: Arch Linux - News: Grub bootloader upgrade and configuration incompatibilities. And in March 2023 there was the luks issue most of our users had an issue with.
Why we not follow what upstream projects want?
Well, first we mostly follow what Arch Linux does. And the monolithic approach was not chosen, but might somewhen in the future. We can try to come up with a tool which remembers how grub was installed and suggest the user to use that same approach or let the user decide if they even want to update grub at all, as long as it works for them.
So what should I personally do?
Well, it is your system. We presented in rich detail the situation. So here it is:
- grub is complex to maintain correctly
- as any other software it has security flaws which get fixed with updates. However grub is special, as a regular package update does NOT change the grub installed to your MBR/EFI as explained already
- You can create an unbootable system when you install grub the wrong way on MBR/EFI, so always keep a bootable USB-Stick with Manjaro on it to rescue your system as needed
Will it be fixed at some point
Well it depends …