Did i do the right thing with Grub issues to fix dual booting Windows?

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TLDR: are the read-only snapshots normal snapshots?, and is GRUB for EFI the correct wat to dual boot insted of GRUB with BLS

Hi everyone!, recently i have been using tumbleweed on my laptop and decided to use it on my desktop, i have 2 nvme drives, one which has windows and the otherone the tumbleweed install, but when i wanted to dual boot i ran into some troubles, that im not really sure if i fixed, so I wanted to ask the comunity.

Here is the timeline:
I installed Tumbleweed normaly using guided partitioner to not wipe my windows drive, and then wanted to dual boot via the GRUB menu.

First thing i found weird is GRUB was text-only (no theme), but system booted fine, then even tho os-prober was finding my windows boot in the other drive it didnt add it as a bootable option, then looking around reddit I discovered that those 2 issues seem to be related to the Grub2 with BLS option which was what was installed, so within that option i tried the following to get windows to show up (this was mostly with the help of AI)

i tried rebuilding the config file with os-prober enabled with sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, I noticed the output correctly identified the Windows Boot Manager, but the entry never appeared in the actual boot menu. I realized my system was using the new GRUB2-BLS

I created /boot/efi/loader/entries/windows.conf pointing to the EFI path on the second drive. This failed to show up at boot.

I copied the Microsoft folder from the Windows EFI partition directly into /boot/efi/EFI/ to trick BLS into seeing it on the same partition. This also did not result in a bootable menu entry.

Then i gave up on getting GRUB with BLS to work so I tried switching the “Bootloader Type” in YaST to GRUB2 for EFI, but received a warning: “Switching from grub2-bls to another bootloader is currently not supported”.

Then i followed the advice on a reddit thread to remove grub bls and force grub2, which seemed to work since now i got the opensuse theme working again and could find my windows boot option, but the next problem arose, i couldnt find my snapshots.

after trying to fix it with no luck i decided to do a complete reinstall of the OS, while choosing GRUB for EFI, and it looks like that fixed all my issues, so finally I made this post for 2 main questions that I have.

1.- Is this the “correct” way to dual boot via GRUB (I dont really want to boot into my BIOS everytime I want to change OS)
2.- Is the “Start bootloader form a read-only snapshot” were my snapshots are stored the full functionability of snapshots?, I ask this just cause of the name “read-only”, and since Im new I want to be sure I have fully functioning snapshots if I mess something up

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Hi!

  1. I have seen posts on Reddit about this, and apparently GRUB BLS does not support dual booting. Using GRUB EFI from the installation seems to be the best approach.

  2. Correct, that is the entry you have to use to select a snapshot, boot from it, and roll back to it if needed. You can read this documentation to learn more about the process and be prepared: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/tumbleweed/snapper/#rolling-back and https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/archive/15.0/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.snapper.html#sec.snapper.snapshot-boot.identify It is a super helpful and time saving feature.

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Yes, that is the simplest way to dual boot.

Every snapshot is read only and cannot be modified as such.
If you need to have full functionality with a previous state of the system you have to “roll back” to that snapshot, via snapper rollback, please see the snapper man page.

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Thank you both!

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