I want to have multiple boot records for systemd-boot, for example, one would show the regular boot menu while the other would boot immediately into the default options. Is this possible? And where can I learn more about how I can do it?
I’m somewhat of a newbie, so I’m not sure where to start.
It looks like the option you want to look at (at least as of nixos-23.11) is specialisation. This option lets you declare another system configuration, possibly based on the configuration in which it is defined, which will show up on the boot menu. I don’t know if these extra entries stick around as new generations are created, but at least it looks like you can have multiple entries for whatever your current generation is.
Specialization doesn’t seems to be quite what I’m looking for.
To expand on what I want, I want to systemd-boot records in UEFI, one of them configured to boot immediately into the latest nixos generation while the other is configured to show the boot menu. This way I can, in theory, not have to wait on systemd-boot unless I want to fiddle with the generations by specifically booting into that record from my bios.
It turns out that I started with the completely wrong premise. I was able to achieve the same result that I’m looking for by configuring systemd-boot with boot.loader.timeout = 0; which would skip the boot menu unless you’re holding “Space”.