Hi, I’ve got a question about the way the ubuntu budgie installer sets up grub. There used to be a --no-bootloader
option on ubiquity, but that was years ago and the current installer doesn’t seem to be ubiquity. I tried searching for this but I only found unrelated grub discussions.
My laptop’s quite recent with uefi firmware, gpt nvme ssd, secure boot disabled, windows 10. Windows is my daily driver and I use either its boot manager or a custom uefi bootloader (refind, a grub alternative).
I basically don’t want the budgie installer to mess too much with my boot setup or ssd. I would expect it to add a grub .efi file and necessities to the ESP, probably add that grub to the uefi boot entries and set it to default (which I can change back to windows/refind via the firmware gui), that’s fine and I’d like that. I would also hope when ubuntu or other systems install or update, that they automatically update the grub config file in the ESP if necessary (new kernel paths and such – I remember years ago this always got broken with updates in other distros).
The thing that has me concerned right now is when installing “Something else…” and choosing a /
partition, the only bootloader device option is strangely (given I’m not running in bios mode) the entire ssd nvme0n1
rather than the ESP itself at nvme0n1p1
. I can’t select anything else. Flashbacks to the MBR days where grub would get written to the disk boot sector and break everything…
So my concrete questions are:
- does “bootloader device:
nvme0n1
” in the installer actually mean the ESP on that ssd despite the lack ofp1
in the name? Or does the installer mistakenly think I’m running bios mode and should this dropdown really be showing me the ESP itself instead? - does grub get installed entirely in the ESP (.efi file, config, efi fs drivers, etc) without critically relying on the ubuntu budgie partition (other than to point to it with a menu entry to boot this installation of course), i.e. would grub itself continue to work if I wiped the distro installation?
- if there’s still any fragile config like kernel paths written to the ESP grub config these days, do those distros (ubuntu flavors) take care to keep those paths and other boot params up to date for themselves during system updates? Do ubuntu flavors add their own entries to an existing grub install so they can all coexist, or does installing another one reset the grub config?
Thanks for your input I don’t really wanna rely just on internet articles because they can be completely outdated or simply not apply to this particular installer.