I’ve been wanting to trying Limine bootloader for a while. GRUB is powerful but it ain’t child’s play to configure. It’s complex enough that I have to often go looking for info if I wanna change it. My main headache with GRUB is that it all gets confusing when you start booting different OSs, especially when they’re on different drives and you have to go into BIOS to select it.
There’s not a massive amount of discussion about Limine. In fact one of the main links that pops up on an internet search is this thread from right here. The other interesting reading I found on it was here.
Limine is simpler than GRUB and almost as powerful. I don’t back myself to install it without stuffing up my ability to boot my system so I just installed a copy of cachyOS which provides it as an install option with BTRFS snapper support pre-configured.
The only thing I had to do was to make a /boot which is big enough to store all kernels one is likely to install, because they are kept in /boot. 2gb is the recommended. Once I had set that up it was all go.
Once a few snapshots had been created they were there for booting in the Limine menu. I also wanted to test it’s ability to load a different bootloader to access other OS installs without going into BIOS. So I typed in one command which got Limine to search for other bootloaders and it found GRUB and on a reboot it was a bootable menu item. Like magic!
One thing that is pretty much the same as GRUB is the kernel options line. The same kernel options seems to work the same in Limine.
It’s a vast improvement over GRUB to me, and unlike some of the other recent options it remains simple and powerful.
I’m just wondering what the Garuda devs and interested parties think of Limine and whether it’s something they might be looking to include in a future install image?
