Official way of switching to Limine?

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hello, I’m currently using openSUSE Tumbleweed and, while my experience has been very good thus far, I hate systemd-boot, as its hard to customize.

I was wondering if i could switch to Limine, as its very easy to customize, but i would run into the issue that i would not be able to keep the snapper entries because (to my understanding) the tool that generates them only works with systemd-boot.

Is there an easy way to fix this issue? I would really like to use limine.

2

When you install the package limine, the documentation will be provided under /usr/share/doc/packages/limine
There are several files in this directory which explain the installation of the bootloader. Is that what you are searching for?

You can test the setup in a VM.

Limine seems to have snapshot support when you install an additional “plugin”: https://gitlab.com/Zesko/limine-snapper-sync

Different distributions have tutorials and tips, e.g.

3

Hi @Marcotrix , welcome.
Before you start, please consider the following:

  • You would very likely be on your own, using a pretty niche bootloader
  • Does a thing so essential for the system, which you see (default) for 8 secs deserve getting in that position?
  • In the installer you can stll pick grub2-efi and have a nicely themed, fully supported bootloader, optimized for the distro.
4

If I was in the same situation, I would choose the third bullet option. :+1:

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5

I would echo what the others said - you don’t need to use systemd-boot to use snapshots; I personally use them with grub2-efi, and they work just fine. :slight_smile:

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6

Can OpenSUSE use BTRFS defaults instead of specifying the root snapshot in the kernel boot parameter? That would help a little at least in decoupling the bootloader from the snapshots if you don’t mind working in the terminal.

7

Snapshots are a feature of BTRFS. AFAIK no other file system currently supports it.

The supported boot options support snapshots. Unsupported boot options (Limine) probably don’t

8

That’s not what I’m talking about, openSUSE specifies the snapshot to mount as the rootfs instead of specifying the default subvolume to mount by settings btrfs filesystem set-default. If you’re willing to do that manually then you don’t need options in your boot manager.

9

I was able to reach a compromise, i installed limine and added an option in it to boot to systemd-boot

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OpenSUSE (on BTRFS) supports booting from its own snapshots using Grub. This bootloader also recognizes other OS systems like Windows11 and Mint and can boot from them too. What it (yet?) seems unable to do is to setup Grub to boot also from Mint BTRFS snapshots.
It is why I thought that Limine offers the best options. But I have not yet explored that road and do not even know if it exists.