On Wed, Nov 16, 2022 at 4:50 PM David T-G <davidtg-robot@justpickone.org> wrote:
But ... There is no boot partition, and everyone has been telling me that I need a boot partition on a GPT disk, so I am still quite confused as to how this can boot.
I do not know what you call a "boot partition". If you mean whatever is mounted on /boot, I fail to see how it is related to GPT. If you mean "BIOS boot partition" - it is needed if you want to install grub outside of any filesystem. During boot grub simply loads its code from absolute disk location. Whether this location is inside the BIOS boot partition or inside your / or /boot partition does not matter at this time. Installing grub in BIOS boot partition is preferred because it is easier to accidentally destroy or corrupt grub file when it is on filesystem. But technically it will work also without this partition, at least as long as filesystem supports it. E.g., grub will refuse to be installed in this mode on btrfs. Which may be one reason why installer insists on creating BIOS boot partition - because default SUSE filesystem is btrfs.