Tumbleweed Gets systemd-boot Support
news.opensuse.org
This week openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots continue to deliver software updates for users wanting to enhance their systems. Updates in this week’s snapshots bro...
  • @[email protected]
    43•9 months ago

    I know people don’t really like systemd much but goddamn if systemd-boot isn’t easier to work with than grub. On my last two Arch installs I’ve used systemd-boot and I have absolutely no complaints. I don’t alway need an entire mini OS to boot my kernel.

    • @[email protected]English
      12•9 months ago

      I concur with this. Glad to see that Tumbleweed is offering it OOTB now, as I believe the only two choices prior to this (if you wanted it setup out of the box) was Arch and NixOS.

      Edit: As pointed out below, Pop_OS! also supports systemd-boot OOTB, not sure how I forgot about it as that was my first exposure to systemd-boot.

        • @[email protected]English
          3•9 months ago

          Ah I don’t know how I forgot about Pop! Pop was actually the first distro I used that had systemd-boot OOTB, and I’ve loved it since then.

          Haven’t been on Pop for a while, but I’m definitely looking forward to giving it another go once the new Cosmic desktop is finished!

    • PAPPP
      5•9 months ago

      Systemd-boot didn’t start as part of systemd, it used to be gummiboot (joke in German, it’s what those little rubber inflatible boats are called).

      Systemd absorbed and integrated it in 2015.

      It did start at RedHat with Kay Sievers and Harald Hoyer, which makes it unsurprising it was absorbed.

      I’ve been transitioning to it as my default choice, I’ve never liked grub2, so I defaulted to syslinux for a long time, but lately systemd-boot is even less of a hassle.

      • @[email protected]
        2•9 months ago

        I think we’ve all felt the pain of dealing with brittle or overly complicated grub installs before.

    • nakal
      -1•9 months ago

      I don’t like systemd at all, but a boot routine that allows to load the plain kernel instead of an image and maybe choose other init systems than systemd would be nice. This is how most other Unix-like systems work.

      • Tobias Hunger
        7•9 months ago

        Starting the init system is the task of the root filesystem or initrd, with any boot loader. Systemd-boot happily boot into any init system just fine, just like any other bootloader that can boot Linux will boot into systemd just fine.

        Systemd-boot boots kernel images (with efi-loader code embedded) and only offers a menu to pick which kernel file to load. What makes systemd-boot interesting is that it does nothing more than that: It does not read random filesystems, it does not implement random encryption things, does not parse image files and complex theme configuration, … .