Graphical GRUB Menu

As you know, when dual booting on OSX you get a nice looking boot menu, something like:

_{(source: askdavetaylor.com)}

I was curious as to whether there is a way to replace the textual interface of GRUB with something a little more, "GUI"-ey. To an extent, to emulate the nice-looking OSX boot menu.

To change this:

to something nicer.

If it is not possible with GRUB, is it possible with another bootloader?

I have already tried using grub-customizer, but it only allows you to change the color of the text.

Does anything like this exist in the Linux world? Or is this Mac-only eye candy?

Solution 1:

Try BURG. I'm sure this is exactly the ticket. It is a themeble GUI overlay for GRUB & Grub Customizer can still administrate.

Brand-new Universal loadeR from Grub;

burg is a brand-new boot loader based on GRUB. It uses a new object format which allows it to be built in a wider range of OS, including Linux/Windows/OSX/FreeBSD, etc. It also has a highly configurable menu system which works in both text and graphic mode. Additional features like stream support and multiple input/output device are also planned.

But, yes, as of comment, not actively maintained. Still I am not aware of an alternative, lets hope a developer picks up the slack...

Solution 2:

Download a nice GRUB Theme

sudo tar -zxvf ~/Downloads/GRUB2-DarkSquares.tar.gz -C /boot/grub2/themes
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
#GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console"
GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/dark_squares/theme.txt"
GRUB_GFXMODE="1024x768"
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg  # Or just /boot/grub2/grub.cfg with one distro.

Works on my Fedora 32 next to Ubuntu 20.04 where update-grub is a stub for running grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg to generate a grub2 config file.