I'm trying to figure out which boot manager to use with CachyOS. From what I've read, Limine is the more popular choice, but I'm confused about what it means to manually enter entries into NVRAM. Is that something I'd have to do often? Does it only come up when I'm adjusting settings in the motherboard's UEFI bios? That's got me a bit hesitant to go with Limine.
On the other hand, rEFInd seems like a good option since it's exclusive to UEFI systems, and both my current and new motherboards support that. Plus, I really want to use BTRFS snapshots to protect my files, and Limine has that enabled by default, while I'd have to enable it in rEFInd. Can anyone clarify that?
Additionally, I was looking into Nobara as a possible choice too because it's supposed to have a lot of drivers for NVidia. However, I found installing it on a USB drive to be really challenging, whereas CachyOS was a breeze (although I did somehow brick one USB drive). After finally getting Nobara installed, the updates took forever, and it kept freezing. I'm not sure if that's typical for Nobara, something wrong with my system, or just the nature of running it from a USB. Just a note—I'm trying both distros on USBs for testing, but I plan to install whichever I prefer on a new M.2 drive.
2 Answers
Honestly, I’d recommend using GRUB. It’s reliable and widely used. If you're interested in rEFInd, it can actually chainload into either systemd-boot or GRUB, which is pretty neat. Just know that running anything from a USB drive might not give you the best experience. I’d say try to use an SSD if you can. About BTRFS snapshots, I’m not sure how effective they would be from a USB. Usually, snapshots are stored on a second drive. If systemd-boot supports it, you could have rEFInd go through that to access snapshots, though!
I chose Limine for my setup and it works great with my dual-boot system. It's really straightforward! I had to use snapshots once, and they worked perfectly. But I can understand your concern about NVRAM; it sounds tricky. If you understand the process better, it might calm your worries. Limine is pretty solid if you can get comfortable with it!
That's good to hear! It was what I was testing on USB, but I want to make sure I won't run into issues later because of that NVRAM stuff.
Yeah, I get what you mean! With testing on USB, it might just be temporary. I plan to go for an SSD too when I decide.