Oh yes, grub is a pain; no argument there. I didn't even like grub 1 and in grub 2 it got several orders of magnitude worse.
I did almost use systemd-boot a few weeks ago though; I moved my SSD to a different laptop and that somehow accidentally booted some remanent of the Windows boot manager, which automatically and helpfully hijacked the lot and now it didn't boot in either the new or old laptop. I ended up using Grub as my distro doesn't provide systemd-boot at all (let alone update hooks), and aside from the hiccup a few weeks ago I haven't had to look at it in over a decade; so for all its ugliness it does "just work" for me, and I figured looking at alternatives would be a bit of a waste of time.
I miss the times where I used FreeBSD and the MBR bootloader they had (have?) just automatically detected things and it would always work without any keffufing about. Just dd these 512K to the start of your disk and presto!
I did almost use systemd-boot a few weeks ago though; I moved my SSD to a different laptop and that somehow accidentally booted some remanent of the Windows boot manager, which automatically and helpfully hijacked the lot and now it didn't boot in either the new or old laptop. I ended up using Grub as my distro doesn't provide systemd-boot at all (let alone update hooks), and aside from the hiccup a few weeks ago I haven't had to look at it in over a decade; so for all its ugliness it does "just work" for me, and I figured looking at alternatives would be a bit of a waste of time.
I miss the times where I used FreeBSD and the MBR bootloader they had (have?) just automatically detected things and it would always work without any keffufing about. Just dd these 512K to the start of your disk and presto!