I tried this as well, trying to get away from the complexity of grub and put kernels into the efi partition instead of a separate /boot partition.
(However systemd peeps can’t help themselves and added a lot of complexity here as well. They make a big mess of the efi system partition with uuids that I don’t need.)
TL;DR is that I had to turn off secure boot for now (access denied), I don’t need it quite yet.
A few tips for the Fedora 39 systemd-boot install which was a big pain. I probably installed it from scratch 4 or 5 times:
- I recommend using Ventoy for the flash drive, so much more flexible.
- You need to use the Fedora “netinstall” iso or it will fail at boot-loader install at the end. (Regular isos don’t have the sdboot packages.)
- Use the inst.sdboot install parameter as directed.
- When you do netinstall with inst.sdboot there will be a conflict with Anaconda something or other and the Cinnamon desktop option and crash.
(I didn’t try other GUI options) - Instead pick “minimal install”.
- Make sure to pick “Additional NetworkManager plugins” on the right side pane after minimal install or you won’t have working wifi after reboot. Which means text console only and no ability to install anything else. Unless you have wired ethernet.
- If you did all that right on the first try, reboot to text console Fedora—with wifi.
- nmcli can get you online.
- Install favorite packages/desktop from dnf.
This will result in a mostly working system, but I still had some medium-sized issues: External monitor from DP-card not responding. Screen off after waking from sleep. Redshift not working.
Upgraded to 3.03 firmware, but it didn’t fix anything. Issues seemed to point to a video driver problem. After an hour or two of fruitless searching I realized the amd_gpu module was not loading, though other amd_ modules were. I tried to load the module manually but it responded only with “bad parameter”. Didn’t register at first but finally thought about kernel parameters.
Kernel parameters! Yes, I think “minimal install” aka text mode put “nomodeset” into the kernel parameters. I removed that at the sdboot menu and those issues were gone.
Then I removed nomodeset from ESP loader confs (I think) and /etc/kernel/cmdline to make sure it is not there for every boot and future installed kernels as well. Phew.
(Next issue is the frequent waking from sleep, think I saw that around here somewhere.)