Is there a "Smart" boot manager?

[BaidDSB]

Like, I want a dual boot with windows and Linux mint.

 

I will need the mint once a day and everything else I want to run is in windows.

 

Now, I want to so that I want windows as the main OS. And I want the boot manager to auto run windows on startup within a set of time like 10 seconds if I don't so anything.

 

So like i open my pc and do nothing, it starts windows. It's only when I click on Linux does Linux boot. Otherwise it doesn't.

[OhioYJ]

So install Windows, and then install Mint (my personal preference is these be on separate drives). Mint will install Grub. Just make Windows the default option in Grub. 10 seconds is default in Grub, but personally I think this is too long so I usually make this 3 seconds so boot time is not increased too much. 

 

This is the setup I used on my son's  PC as he usually uses Windows. All my other PCs boot to Linux by default. 

[HanZie82]

This should be able to do so;

https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/

 

You might have to set it up, as in point it to your installed OSes and set a timeout and automagically selected option etc.

[BaidDSB]

23 minutes ago, OhioYJ said:

So install Windows, and then install Mint (my personal preference is these be on separate drives). Mint will install Grub. Just make Windows the default option in Grub. 10 seconds is default in Grub, but personally I think this is too long so I usually make this 3 seconds so boot time is not increased too much. 

 

This is the setup I used on my son's  PC as he usually uses Windows. All my other PCs boot to Linux by default. 

Is there a video tutorial on how to set it up?

[HanZie82]

3 minutes ago, BaidDSB said:

Is there a video tutorial on how to set it up?

Having over a million hours uploaded per day, yes everything is on youtube nowadays.
 

 

[OhioYJ]

47 minutes ago, BaidDSB said:

Is there a video tutorial on how to set it up?

Mint will install Grub automatically. All you need to do is change a couple options. You can modify the default options to in the default folder so they update automatically when the things update like the kernel and such. 

 

However I also modify the grub.cfg to clean things up too. This file though gets updated automatically, so it's the reason the file says do not make changes to this file.

 

I think manually reinstalling Grub is overcomplicating it.  You can use the GUI text editor to modify a couple entries and your good to go. 

 

When I get home I can take a couple screen shots from one of my PCs on how do it.

[OhioYJ]

@BaidDSB Here is how I do this, from Mint:

 

First you can edit the default file is the default settings for your grub config file. Below, I change the default resolution of Grub, as booting up and have the menu in 4k or even 1440 is dumb, it's hard to read. The resolution has to be something your monitor supports though. I've found 1024 works nicely on all my machines. Remember this is just text, but this is just my opinion. Grub Default, is the default option, this will be the default boot option.

 

 

This is the config file. I also modify this, despite the warnings in this file not to. The only reason not to is because it gets automatically updated. Primarily during kernel updates, and grub updates.  You'll notice in mine, I deleted every boot option other than one Linux option, and one Windows option. My default boot option is Linux, so =0. Windows is the second line, so if I wanted to boot into Windows by default, my default boot option would be =1. All the options set in the default file above can be set in this config file too, they just get wiped and have to be reset if you do an update.

 

 

Final word of warning, be careful in these files, as mess up grub, and the PC won't boot. Not the end of the world, as you can recover of it. However, it will be annoying. Especially if you aren't particularly familiar with these things.