openSUSE Tumbleweed Is Finding Success Moving From GRUB To systemd-boot

[bachchain]

I wonder if there are any distros that use discoverable partitions by default

[Anux]

Are there any disadvantages for a normal openSUSE Desktop user with systemd-boot? I don't need encryption and the OS would be the only OS on the system.

As far as I'm aware of it provides all features that grub does, even TPM encryption if you trust closed hardware.

From an end user point of view I don't see a difference, if you manually configure your boot loader gummiboot is much cleaner and simpler to configure.

[DrYak]

Are there any disadvantages for a normal openSUSE Desktop user with systemd-boot? I don't need encryption and the OS would be the only OS on the system.

Another example: My workstation at home is rather old, and its motherboard is still based on an actual legacy BIOS firmware (with some very limited support for UEFI in a compatibility layer sitting atop the BIOS). (it's one of the last motherboard designed this way. For the following revision of the exact same motherboard, Gigabyte switched to the classical UEFI firmware + CSM for compatibility with legacy BIOS).
systemd-boot doesn't support Legacy BIOS at all. (I haven't tested the UEFI compatibility shim, but I strongly suspect that one only covers the bare minimum to keep contemporary Windows versions happy).
systemd-boot can't boot FreeDOS (and DOS was a requirement for updating firmware on that older legacy BIOS motherboard, unlike UEFI firmware in modern motherboard which can do entirely within the EFI Shell, no installed OS required).

GRUB does support these (using tumbleweed's grub-i386 package).

But I know I am an outlier. Most use cases needed by most people are well covered by systemd-boot and that's why it makes sens for openSuse to switch to the less complicated solution which is likely to be useful to the vast majority of their users (not only home users with non-complicated machines, but also including VMs and server farms).

Does it play well with u-boot?

Yes, kind of:
- U-boot can optionally support EFI (E.g. PinePhone Pro recently turned this on).
- This EFI interface was already what openSuse TumbleWeed has used in the past on some ARM devices (out of the top of my head: PineBook Pro, and I think RaspBerry Pi).
- systemd-boot is exclusively UEFI based and thus can leverage this EFI support (if compiled into the specific U-boot).

I just like grub.

Me, too.

But you have to conceed that GRUB has evolved to the point it's almost its own miniature cross platform OS.

(Though to be honnest, that's also the case of modern UEFI + EFI Shell. Which explains the logic behind systemd-boot: just leverage the "kinda mini OS" already provided by EFI, instead of an oversized boot manager evolving into yet another OS serving as another layer just to get the final Linux booting liek GRUB does).

[Old Grouch]

As I understand it, systemd-boot is simpler and less flexible than GRUB.

This is advantageous when your use-case is covered by systemd-boot's capabilities. Simpler is better. Fewer things to misconfigure and go wrong. However, if you need the extra flexibility that GRUB provides, you are our of luck with systemd-boot.

I would not be surprised if the majority of users' needs are covered by systemd-boot, which is not good for those that need GRUB's additional capabilities, as there will be fewer resources devoted to fault-finding and developing GRUB.

[Setif]

Does systemd-boot supprt multi-booting with Windows and other Linux distos.

[reba]

Does this mean every kernel update is a write to the UEFI boot table NVRAM?

[CommunityMember]

systemd-boot doesn't support Legacy BIOS at all.

And it likely never will. However, while legacy BIOS support is important to some, it has become far less important in the ecosystem at large.

There was some talk about resurrecting the UEFI emulator for BIOS systems called DUET (or one of its various forks) in order to simplify the entire boot process. I don't think anyone has stepped up to do the work.

[Britoid]

Well, there's no disadvantages especially if you only use one os, if you do dualboot, one disadvantage is, you'll lost config that familiar to you.

Not really, GRUB has moved to the BLS Spec and systemd-boot also follows it, so for detecting boot entries they both read the same config.

[Britoid]

Does systemd-boot supprt multi-booting with Windows and other Linux distos.

Yes, systemd-boot is a EFI Boot Manager, it doesn't actually do any of the bootng part like GRUB does.

It gets the EFI firmware to run other EFI binaries, which are typically the Windows Boot Manager or a Linux kernel. If you have a EFI Boot Entry for the Window Boot Manager, it will probably show in systemd-boot, but if it doesn't, your EFI Firmware boot menu will show it anyway.

systemd-boot can also load EFI fs drivers to boot EFI files from non-FAT32 devices, this can be used to boot Linux kernels from ext4/xfs/btrfs devices (avoiding putting them on the small efi partition), but so far no distro uses this feature out the box.

[Anux]

Does systemd-boot supprt multi-booting with Windows and other Linux distos.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_boot_process#Feature_comparison