I know people don’t really like systemd much but goddamn if systemd-boot isn’t easier to work with than grub. On my last two Arch installs I’ve used systemd-boot and I have absolutely no complaints. I don’t alway need an entire mini OS to boot my kernel.
I don't like systemd at all, but a boot routine that allows to load the plain kernel instead of an image and maybe choose other init systems than systemd would be nice. This is how most other Unix-like systems work.
Starting the init system is the task of the root filesystem or initrd, with any boot loader. Systemd-boot happily boot into any init system just fine, just like any other bootloader that can boot Linux will boot into systemd just fine.
Systemd-boot boots kernel images (with efi-loader code embedded) and only offers a menu to pick which kernel file to load. What makes systemd-boot interesting is that it does nothing more than that: It does not read random filesystems, it does not implement random encryption things, does not parse image files and complex theme configuration, … .
Systemd-boot didn’t start as part of systemd, it used to be gummiboot (joke in German, it’s what those little rubber inflatible boats are called).
Systemd absorbed and integrated it in 2015.
It did start at RedHat with Kay Sievers and Harald Hoyer, which makes it unsurprising it was absorbed.
I’ve been transitioning to it as my default choice, I’ve never liked grub2, so I defaulted to syslinux for a long time, but lately systemd-boot is even less of a hassle.
I concur with this. Glad to see that Tumbleweed is offering it OOTB now, as I believe the only two choices prior to this (if you wanted it setup out of the box) was Arch and NixOS.
Edit: As pointed out below, Pop_OS! also supports systemd-boot OOTB, not sure how I forgot about it as that was my first exposure to systemd-boot.
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