Comment # 54 on bug 1226122 from Mario Guzman

I know that there must be some rational for the changes, and since I multi
boot, I may not be the “normal” user who installs Linux much like Windows where
the system assumes it’s the only thing on the computer. However, Linux is used
for much more such as development. In those cases multiboot is much more
common, I sometimes have 10 OSs on one machine. For the past many years, since
SUSE 7, I have had no trouble using it as my primary Linux. This is largely due
to it not interfering with other systems. It installed easy, and could boot
from other boot managers. I may have a more complex need since I boot MacOS and
Linux natively. I only boot Windows under Linux Virtualbox rarely. I don’t use
Grub since it’s a pain to maintain and the following ways I boot are much
easier for me:

• Refind Plus on internal SSD to boot multiple Linux and distributions on
multiple Mac internal SSDs. It also allows booting macOS.

• Refind Plus on external SSD to boot multiple Linux and distributions on
multiple Mac internal and external SSDs. It also allows booting macOS. This
REQUIRES the boot name to be BOOTX64 (Next item).

• Using the builtin Mac booter holding Option at boot: It will find all
internal and external macOS systems, as well as any partition containing
BOOTX64

• I boot Opencore to allow running unsupported macOSs on old Macs. I can either
boot Refind to OC to macOS, or OC to Refind to macOS or any Linux.

I can’t image the work that would be added if OpenSUSE required 2 partitions
per system, one to contain EFI and code unique to that system. Because that’s
what I have have to do, and external support would be a mess. Through the
years, everything needed to boot Opensuse was kept in one partition and that
makes multi boot much easier.

Some people here said I could do other things, well, been there done that (or
most of them) over the years. What I have now is super simple to maintain and
add Linux and macOS systems to. Having an EFI for each Linux OS would be a
mess. The macOS systems are easy because they share a container (multiple
macOSs in a sine partition!). Linux on the other hand requires a partition,
requiring an EFI for each would be a mess of maintenance.

Since I was able to fix the problem by simply checking the needed boot script
during install, why not keep it like it is, if no boot manager is selected,
default to the original script so that /boot is loaded and the system is
bootable, continue to allow missing /boot/efi as just a warning. If the new
boot manager is selected I don’t know what is needed. If the long term plan is
to remove Grub, please consider the above and provide a mechanism to boot from
/boot and not require a /boot/efi.

Finally, I want to thank you all so much for all your hard work. I have used
Opensuse and Tumbleweed and have setup multiple friends, most non-technical
with Opensuse and they are happy. Would love to keep using it and always look
forward to what’s next!