bootloaders on openSUSE

My comment does not directly relate to the authors experience because a.) I have still been too lazy to learn EFI and b.) my 12.3 image is just downloading as I type.

However, in general OpenSUSE approach to the bootloader has never met my personal criteria of least surprise. By default they install grub (nowadays grub2 to be exact) into the /boot partition (I typically have a separate one). Into the MBR they install a generic bootloader, which does nothing more than 1.) looks at which DOS partition has the boot flag set and 2.) calls the bootloader inside that partition.

It's a while since I installed the last OpenSUSE in a multi-boot configuration, but if that's the default regardless whether they are the only one on the disk or not it is not very co-operative to say it friendly.

Generally I have failed to get the idea with their generic loader. It could look like a symmetric way of having multi-boot using different boot loaders (or versions thereof) for the different systems instead of chain-loading. But I'm not aware of any user-friendly way to switch boot flags between power-on and boot, so it makes no sense for supporting multi-boot. Or do BIOSes acutually support this??? Now that I write it, it comes to my mind that I might not have looked at BIOS menus a lot after I first used OpenSUSE some 2.5 years ago. Well even if it could be done in BIOS, it seem slow than jumping through 2 levels of grub menus in chain-load scenario.