Today marks the end of an era for me. I said goodbye to my beloved lilo (which never, ever gave me the slightest problem in almost 25 years of use) and installed GRUB, which doesn't feel as comfy, to be honest.
So, today I went back to the relevant thread on LQ (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/grub2-in-slackware-discussion-and-instruction-4175727986/), because I thought I could finally understand what they were talking about, and was amazed at the amount of spaghetti people write to solve what it turned out to be a very simple task.
I guess the moral of the story is: read the documentation. It really pays off.
Well, first problem detected: for some (obviously stupid) reason GRUB decided that having NumLock on is too wasteful and turns it off for the planet's sake.
It's easy to modify rc.local to set it on again, but I didn't have to when I used lilo. And what if I wanted it on from the very start?
Also, if GRUB turns it off, shouldn't there be an option in GRUB to revert that? If it exists, I can't find it.
The reason I use Slackware is because I understand why everything happens. I could look at lilo.conf and understand what it did and modify it according to my needs. I can understand GRUB configuration, too, but then these things happen out of nowhere and I feel cheated.
@josemanuel@qoto.org wait, did you exhaust your bootloaders? i feel like there should be another one.
i wanted to switch to limine but decided against it because i didn't wanna mess with pacman hooks. i've never touched one.
@mata_aimasho Traditionally in Slackware we've had several bootloaders (lilo, elilo and GRUB), but, starting with the next stable version, only GRUB will be officially supported. (After all, resources are limited.) That's why I changed.
Limine was discussed, but discarded, precisely for that reason. Also, some people said it was too geared towards kernel development and, thus, not general-purpose enough.
Given that Slackware is _mostly_ a one-man operation and that the bootloader is a very important part of the installer, I guess it makes sense to try and reduce its number.
@josemanuel@qoto.org yeah it does make sense, but it's also depressing. the world needs more human resources but we don't have enough resources to maintain every human decently, and as a result you have to use GRUB.