I'm fairly new to Solus (a few weeks now) and there are a few changes I want to suggest for a future release:

  1. When Solus is installed alongside Windows or some other distribution, set a timeout by default so the user can see the boot menu.

  2. clr-boot-manager has the 'mount-boot' argument to mount the EFI partition. Please add a new argument to unmount the EFI partition.

  3. At present, Solus is the selected OS by default. Please add a new argument for clr-boot-manager to implement the 'default @saved' configuration. By adding this new argument, a user can choose whether to keep Solus as the selected OS all the time, or to save the current OS so when the system is restarted from Solus, it's selected, and when it's restarted from any other OS, it's selected.

Thank you for creating such an excellent distribution. I know it has been a lot of work, and I'm probably asking a lot here. If what I suggest is not something you want to pursue for any reason, that's O.K. with me. I only make these suggestions because I think they will give the user more choices and I think that is part of what Open Source is about, freedom and choice.

Ernie

    Harvey changed the title to Changes to clr-boot-manager .

    ewilcox At present, Solus is the selected OS by default. Please add a new argument for clr-boot-manager to implement the 'default @saved' configuration.

    This (i.e. the new systemd-boot @saved functionality) was actually recently discussed in the Solus Development Matrix channel (funnily enough almost at the same as you starting your first forum thread about this)

    One of the last things said about it was the following by @silke

    Not to discourage you, but 1) this should happen in clr-boot-manager, which is pretty much dead and 2) there needs some way to conditionally enable it, as it will prevent automatic kernel upgrades (if I understand it correctly).

    This also ties into your second point. clr-boot-manager is an upstream project separate from Solus, and while Solus team members (in particular @silke) created a lot of custom patches already, and try to get them merged back into the main project, that is a slow and painful process. Of the eight open pull requests in the clr-boot-manager repository, seven are by Solus team members. The oldest ones are now exactly three years old and still haven't been merged.

    The last one that actually was merged was a bit older still, and was accepted in 2021

    This all just to give some context, and not to say that it's impossible.

      Thanks for the feedback! While I don't think these things will happen in clr-boot-manager, we may include them in any future replacement. No promises on if/when though!

      clr-boot-manager has the 'mount-boot' argument to mount the EFI partition. Please add a new argument to unmount the EFI partition.

      This command is umount /boot. But you should probably keep it mounted as unmounting it requires ensuring that everything else that requires /boot access is done (possible candidates are clr-boot-manager itself and services depending on clr-boot-manager-mount-boot.service).

      This is a solvable problem, but not going to happen in clr-boot-manager.

      7 days later

      Thank you for this reply. Now I better understand the issues facing the Solus team regarding clr-boot-manager.

      Ernie