Is there a PC Equivalent of NOOBS on the Raspberry Pi?

TheRadioSnake · January 12, 2019

So I got a Raspberry Pi, right? And I love using NOOBS because of how simple it is to pick between a variety of OS' on startup (ones that're already installed, of course). But I was wondering if there was a PC equivalent to this, as I boot 5 OS' on a kinda frequent basis (Win 10, Win 7, Parrot, Ubuntu, and Mint). I'd just like a GUI on startup that lets me pick between OS'. And as always, thanks for any help!

NullKernel · January 19, 2019

The boot loader (or boot manager) is the specific piece you're talking about - the thing that a PC boots first and will let you select between the different OSs you have installed.

GRUB, albeit not exactly a GUI, is the most well-known and well-supported, I believe, and supports both legacy and UEFI setups. Personally, I have GRUB on my laptop and rEFInd - more like a classical GUI - on my desktop (both are Win10, Arch Linux dual boots). Both have kept me very satisfied.

In GRUB's case, you have it generate a config during installation - usually it will automatically detect other OSs installed on mounted drives and add them to its config. However, this requires the config to be regenerated when an OS is installed or removed. rEFInd instead loads a driver at boot time and does a quick check of the connected drives for OSs it can boot, removing the need to re-gen the config file.

Of course there are many others and all have their pros and cons, so do some reading and pick the one that makes the most sense for you. Ubuntu uses GRUB by default, so you might start with that.