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I have installed Manjaro alongside BlackArch. BlackArch has its bootloader in /boot which is a separate partition. Manjaro has three partitions, one for root(/), one for /boot, and one for /boot/efi. Now, let's say I want to install Fedora. Will there be any problem if I point Fedora's /boot/efi to Manjaro's /boot/efi partition? Also, I currently have only two OSes: BlackArch and Manjaro. However, in UEFI, there are 4 bootable options listed:

One "Linux Boot Manager" entry, one "Manjaro" entry and two "UEFI OS" entries. How should I get rid of the duplication?

Here is the pic of the UEFI bootable menu:

PS. I installed Kali Linux (which uses GRUB) just to see what exactly happens, and this is the efibootmgr results after Kali's installation:

BootCurrent: 0004    
Timeout: 1 seconds    
BootOrder: 0002,0004,0000,0001,0005    
Boot0000* Linux Boot Manager HD(4,GPT,db98bb6f-7706-374e-80ce-09d0b0ee32c6,0x64096000,0xfa000)/File(\EFI\SYSTEMD\SYSTEMD-BOOTX64.EFI)    
Boot0001* UEFI OS HD(4,GPT,db98bb6f-7706-374e-80ce-09d0b0ee32c6,0x64096000,0xfa000)/File(\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI)..BO    
Boot0002* kali HD(4,GPT,db98bb6f-7706-374e-80ce-09d0b0ee32c6,0x64096000,0xfa000)/File(\EFI\KALI\GRUBX64.EFI)    
Boot0004* Manjaro HD(3,GPT,6881d199-30c9-4a84-ac40-084ff6bb472b,0x64000000,0x96000)/File(\EFI\MANJARO\GRUBX64.EFI)    
Boot0005* UEFI OS HD(3,GPT,6881d199-30c9-4a84-ac40-084ff6bb472b,0x64000000,0x96000)/File(\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI)..BO
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You do not actually need that many partitions. You need one EFI system partition to install GRUB into. One partition usually suffices for an installation. There is no actual need for a separate /boot partition for every installation.

I recommend installing GRUB just once and stick to that. Clear out all other EFI "executables" from the ESP. GRUB can manage multiple Linux installations just fine. All distributions you mentioned support GRUB one way or another. After installing GRUB, when generating the GRUB configuration, the other Linux installations should be detected by the os-prober. This mechanism may or may not need to be enabled explicitly depending on your configuration.

On a side note: I recommend deciding for a distribution in the long run. Maintaining multiple installations and remembering what is where will become tedious soon.

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  • The problem is that sometimes, the installation of new OS tries to format the ESP. Could you also help me clear out the redundant EFI executables? What should I use to do that? EFIBootMgr? And thanks for the side note: I actually do have a Fedora installation in a separate 2TB HDD. That is my main system. I am actually distro-hopping on a spare 1TB HDD. Trying out the other distros and checking how things work differently. Commented Jan 1, 2019 at 21:37
  • Most Linux installers allow choosing if and where to install the boot manager, although you may need to switch to expert mode installation for the options to be visible. I would go to /boot/efi/EFI/ and delete everything I do not want to show up at the EFI boot selection screen (I would also have a super grub 2 disk at hand). I never used Fedora, but you may need do be careful with it. They apparently need more than one file for their boot procedure as described here. Commented Jan 1, 2019 at 22:09
  • @SabyasachiMukherjee Which operating systems format the ESP? They are definitely not supposed to do that. You can think of the ESP as a per-disk extension of the firmware ("BIOS"). There is only one piece of firmware, and there should be only one ESP per disk (preferably only one ESP per system, imo.) Commented Jan 2, 2019 at 6:35
  • @Johan Myréen OpenSuse tumbleweed did that. Don't know if it's fixed now. Commented Jan 2, 2019 at 20:46

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