So, not sure what happened, but recently I noticed most all my Debian installs have hosed themselves beyond repair if they have a grub theme set. Literally 3/4 of my laptops, after updates in the last couple days, won’t boot. Even if I boot up with a USB, chroot in, turn off the theme, still won’t boot. Acts like the grub boot files simply can’t be read anymore. Not sure why my desktop and 1 laptop survived…but that’s not important. What’s important, is that after reinstalling one, I literally watched that it’s the theme. Had rebooted, noticed I forgot to set a grub theme, so set the grub theme, rebooted, ne’er to boot again. Only thing I did while it was running, was add the GRUB_THEME: “/path/to/theme” in the /etc/default/grub and run the grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg. So I know it’s the grub theme that broke them. Also, it’s the same grub theme I’m still running on this desktop, so it’s definitely NOT the theme that’s the issue. Oh well…
Anyway, I now have 3 less laptops booting Debian in my life, and an extra laptop booting Endeavour (and 1 extra booting KDE Neon, and 1 extra booting OpenSUSE)!!
Hopefully never. I have yet to ever have an install with systemd boot actually boot after hitting restart. Have to do all my Endeavour installs as grub.
Not really, grub works great. So no loss IMO. Also I don’t believe systemd-boot supports theming yet, so I wouldn’t use it for more than verifying it works. I won’t deal with an unthemed bootloader. Simply too ugly IMO.
I personally just want my system to boot, so as simple as it can be, the better. I also didn’t have problems with grub, but I have heard horror stories of grub and UEFI systems. I don’t know though, never had such problems with grub personally.
I would switch instantly to systemd-boot if there would be a reliable snapper integration.
I tried using own scripts for a while, but it’s too much tinkering.
As far as I’ve noticed SUSE is working on something, let’s see what happens in the future.
Yeah, I think a lot of people in Linux community is like that. I’m more of a “everything must look AMAZING!!!” person. Every machine has different wallpapers, different color scheme, differen plasma theme, different window decorations, different cursors, different bootloader theme. They don’t always match, but I always like how they look, and that’s what’s important to me. I wouldn’t use something regularly where I lost the ability to customize every nook and cranny for my personal tastes.
I’ll admit, that looks neat. However, ultimately since Grub is an optional part of the Endeavour install, it’s not something I’d be interested in if/until some distro’s move to only offering systemd-boot.
I don’t know if I’ve ever used a grub theme, since I don’t actually see it ever. I set the timeout to zero, with quiet and what not. But I’m now tempted (and shocked) to try it on my Debian install.
Also - Not that I don’t know it’s the same - but is grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg the correct update for Debian also? I’ve only used update-grub. Maybe it’s just an alias for the same thing, or maybe Debian does their grub stuff a bit differently.
I’ll watch the forum there, you can’tbe the only person if this happened on 3 of your 4 laptops.
update-grub is just a built-in alias (anymore) for the grub-mkconfig yada yada command. With grub2 they do the same thing. I got used to use grub-mkconfig because MOST distro’s don’t have update-grub as a command, so you HAVE to use grub-mkconfig.
You don’t need to tell my to rtfm lol. I’m busy and on my phone most of the time as I don’t have a lot of free computer time. I’m extremely busy rebuilding a golf course, dealing with someone in my family on the last legs of cancer, managing flights to and from the other coast on a regular basis to help with that, on top of a busy normal everyday life. Now get over whatever your deal is against me and just read the fine post. If I had time to go thru and read every line in the manual, I would. I just made the suggestion it may be different from here. Thanks. Some of us are just trying to help and point folks in the right direction. There’s a lot of very smart folks here who can also double check the manual or have had enough time to do so already like yourself. Someday I hope to have all the time to fact check and deliver all the answers. Today isn’t that day yet.
never stop … i luv your straight talk 
( it rare in modern time )
Thanks. Some of us are just trying to help and point folks in the right direction. There’s a lot of very smart folks here who can also double check the manual or have had enough time to do so already like yourself. Someday I hope to have all the time to fact check and deliver all the answers. Today isn’t that day yet.