weh why is GRUB still default on alpine. first thing I do after install is throwing it out and installing gummiboot

@domi recently I've been messing with refind (esp. since it works so well with void) and it's also quite nice
no idea why anyone uses grub nowadays tbh, unless you don't have a UEFI platform

@toast refind is also quite cool, but not what i’m looking for

on BIOS platforms i’d honestly prefer LILO over GRUB. also there’s limine which fucks

@domi eh gummiboot is also unmaintained, would just use sd-boot tbh

@domi isn’t gummiboot part of systemd

@MarkAssPandi yesn’t - they changed the name for no fucking reason, then proceeded to make no changes. i fucking hate this behavior

@domi Using the default install scripts?

@domi also the whole setup-alpine process is heavily outdated and can probably be just rewritten

@weirdtreething yeaah

@weirdtreething oh, it also picks to use LVM by default now

alright i’m gonna do it by hand, i’m good

@domi I hate how it always creates a swap partition. The defaults just don't work for me

@domi awful

@domi generally yes, if it work for you, use it.

but i know that some people noticed bugs with gummiboot, and in case of gummiboot there is even a maintained sucessor, so for a distro bootloader i would certainly use sd-boot isntead

@domi (trying very hard not to start another project, aaaa)

@MarkAssPandi we have gummiboot packaged…

@domi @MarkAssPandi probably to try to evade all the hate that gets anything related to systems ?

@fossdd regardless, we both agree it wouldn’t be GRUB xD

@domi yes 100%

@domi last time i messed with alpine it used lilo ?

(also actually worked on i686)

@weirdtreething @domi also until recently (thanks @vixalientoots) it installed chrony as ntp client, when busybox even has its own ntp implementation, like wtf

@evv42 if you were on BIOS: likely not LILO but extlinux/syslinux. unless you used some insanely old 2.x

@fossdd @weirdtreething @vixalientoots i’m not that mad at chrony because it never got in my way. but yeah it’s weird

the whole alpine installer still leaves something to be desired. i’d love to recode it, but I’m fearing the absolute fucking bikeshed clusterfuck I’d end up in, so I think I’m gonna keep not touching alpine for the time being

@domi oh, yeah, that one, sowwy

@evv42 nothing to be sorry for

@domi yeah last time I did from-scratch isos I used limine
it's funny in some ways but they also have some weird parts
still way better than… uh… grub
I'd probably just syslinux on BIOS, like in the good old days :^)

@domi @weirdtreething @vixalientoots fair, i think just something simple like archinstall or chimeras new installer would be a major improvement. could be a testing package first and when enough people have used it, replace alpine-conf with it.

actually you know what, im gonna start with it now xd

@domi I think most of my Alpines are using syslinux, so at least it's also not the pain that's grub.

@domi @toast I still can't believe the only reason I started using limine is because I was testing Arch installer on VM and picked the most stupid-sounding option, only for it to turn out to be a really nice thing xD

@domi Like in terms of grub pains I got, you can probably guess them from https://hacktivis.me/git/grub-nomagic-scripts/files.html

@domi I'm not so up-to-date with the bootloader scene, so: what is wrong w/GRUB2?

@domi ye my bad didn’t know I thought gummiboot was more integrated with systemd since name change

@toast @domi
>no idea why anyone uses grub nowadays tbh
LUKS support even though it leaves a lot to be desired in grub. I was too lazy to reinstall Windows on my laptop with a bigger ESP partition and the Windows default is way too small for a kernel and initrd.

@phaseseeker PITA to setup unless someone (your distro maintainer…) did it for you, and your setup is typical

codebase sucks, there’s a lot of old hacks in there

plus personal preference

@domi because most people use grub, i'd imagine

@domi Had to search for gummiboot.

Didn't expect to find this.

So often I search for the name of some tech thing and end up getting jumpscared by something mundane and I never see it coming.

@domi for real… UAPI’s BLS is just so much better, even in the form of grub-bls from fedora/openSUSE

@domi @weirdtreething FWIW, you can replace what it uses by setting some environment variables. It’s documented in the wiki under sone section related to semi automated installation or something

they oughta use lilo, obviously

CC: @domi@donotsta.re

@domi I wish GRUB actually was default. It's only default for UEFI (which I do not use), otherwise it installs syslinux (which I then always replace with GRUB because I use GRUB as a coreboot payload)

@weirdtreething @domi and for me, 4GB is just too small.
But it's either "take the defaults" or "partition the disk manually" with setup-alpine...

I would switch completely to Windows over choice to use busybox software

@fossdd @weirdtreething @domi @vixalientoots

@domi like im not systemd anti evangelist but afaik alpine doesnt use systemd so it’d explain that default i think

@domi oh
lol

@domi why not go without a bootloader at all? efi stub works just fine, although i had to write my own tool to have it nicely configurable from a config file...