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I'm on Fedora right now and will probably be keeping that. But aiming to add several linux distros in a multi-boot setup (no Microsoft products involved). The other likely candidates include Nobara, Rocky, OpenSUSE, Alphine, Arch, and Void (haven't decided on which ones or how many yet). I would like to set this up as one big LUKS2 partition with a Btrfs filesystem and each OS organized into its own respective Btrfs subvolume. I'm currently using BIOS mode but planning to reinstall under UEFI. My assumption is that I will need to have multiple boot partitions for however many OSes I plan to go with (haven't done much on UEFI before so I am unclear if distros can "share" a boot partition - particularly Fedora/Nobara/Rocky bc Anaconda has a bug where it removes the boot partition for other Fedora installs).
Initial research has led me to think that, while systemd boot will likely be faster than grub (I don't reboot often so that actually doesn't matter too much but an improvement is still an improvement), it might not be very customizable in terms of theming and such and that this is unlikely to change anytime soon. Assuming that's true about colors, should I also assume that I am limited in terms of layout as well (e.g. I would only be able to use a vertical, text-based list similar to GRUB and not be able to have a horizontal menu with icons, or have "sub-menus" organized by distro, etc)?
Are there any other bootloaders I should be considering? My understanding was that LILO and BURG have essentially been abandoned so even if I were willing to rely on an abandoned project for something as important as the bootloader (I'm not btw) then it probably would not work with LUKS/Btrfs. While doing my initial research, I did come across Clover but I know even less about that than I do about Systemdboot and Refined. My initial impressions is that it seems very customizable theming-wise but it feels like maybe not too many people use it / I'd have a hard time finding help and that's IF it even supports LUKS/Btrfs.
Related posts
- Ubuntu 24.04 (and Debian) removed libsystemd from SSH server dependencies
- Systemd minimizing required dependencies for libsystemd
- Going in circles without a real-time clock
- Excellent succinct breakdown of the xz mess, from an OpenBSD developer
- What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world