Archinstall vs. Calamares (EndeavourOS installer)

General system EndeavourOS installation
1

Hi, I have a question and hope someone here can help me with it. It’s not exactly a major issue that people deal with often. Description: In a dual-boot setup with MX Linux and EndeavourOS (using Calamares)—where MX Linux manages GRUB—the Endeavour installation is detected very quickly and immediately when running `sudo update-grub`. However, when I set up a dual-boot with MX Linux or Debian and use Archinstall instead of Calamares for Endeavour, the GRUB update takes ages to detect the Arch installation. Once detected, everything works as usual, and there are absolutely no problems. I’ve noticed that others have observed this behavior too, but I haven’t been able to find anything that explains it or fixes the issue. Does the Calamares installer do something that Archinstall doesn’t? Does EndeavourOS perhaps install packages that are missing in Archinstall? I hope this issue can be cleared up. Many thanks in advance!

Cheers!

2

I don’t think this is an easy question to answer.

archinstall and the EndeavourOS installer were built entirely independently so there should be lots of differences between them but we don’t have any easy way of telling you want they are.

3

Unfortunately, I cannot describe the issue in any greater detail, as I only notice it after GRUB updates. However, it happens every time, regardless of whether GRUB is managed by Debian or MX Linux.

4

It isn’t that you haven’t described the issue enough, it is more that we don’t know what the differences between EOS installer and archinstall are.

One difference is that EOS uses dracut instead of mkinitcpio but I am not sure that would cause the issue you are seeing. That may be unrelated.

5

At first, I thought the issue might be related to my old ThinkPad (which uses BIOS), but I encountered the same problem after trying it on my old MacBook Pro, which already has UEFI. The MacBook actually presented a different issue: the GRUB menu didn’t appear when using the Debian netinstaller, leaving no way to boot into Arch. When I installed Arch using `archinstall` and managed GRUB that way instead of using Debian, a standard GRUB menu still didn’t appear; instead, I could select the Arch UEFI installation at startup, but there was no subsequent menu for booting Debian. Perhaps my old hardware is to blame, but that explanation feels somewhat inadequate, given that it has worked perfectly with MX and Endeavour for a long time.

6

Is there maybe a problem because of the filesystems you use actually? I use an older hdd with different linux distributions installed on it. One installation uses btrfs as filesystem, and every other installation ignores this distro when os-prober searches for installed operating systems. And are you sure that both os are installed in the same mode (BIOS or UEFI)?

7

Isn’t there something like os-prober-btrfs on some distributions? I remember reading about that a while back. :thinking:

8

So far, I’ve always used ext4 for every PC and every distro. I’m certain my old ThinkPad only supports BIOS, so I assume both installers can only use that installation method. As for my old MacBook, I obviously can’t be sure whether it might also have an old BIOS mode, though official specifications state it has UEFI.