Pop!_OS 19.10 has been my daily drive since I had my ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 in March. I’m very satisfied with the overall experience. But Pop!_OS 20.04 is coming and I’m eager to try new features in Pop!_OS 20.04. At the same time, I don’t want my existing setup to be affected. To achieve this, I decided to install Pop!_OS 20.04 Beta to a new partition. I spent a bit time to setup the systemd-boot configuration. Hopefully my setup is helpful for other Linux users.

Before you do anything, you need to become root user:

sudo -s

Pop!_OS uses /boot/efi/loader/loader.conf to manage boot screen. It normally just contains 1 line:

default Pop_OS-current

It means it will load /boot/efi/loader/entries/Pop_OS-current.conf which is created automatically with Pop!_OS installation.

Before I installed Pop!_OS 20.04 beta, I copied Pop_OS-current.conf to Pop_OS-19.10.conf and change title to Pop!_OS-19.10. This will prevent the file from being overridden by new installation.

/boot/efi/loader/entries/Pop_OS-19.10.conf

title Pop!_OS-19.10

linux /EFI/Pop_OS-672f67aa-d31f-439a-ae54-6aa93e185801/vmlinuz.efi

initrd /EFI/Pop_OS-672f67aa-d31f-439a-ae54-6aa93e185801/initrd.img

options root=UUID=672f67aa-d31f-439a-ae54-6aa93e185801 ro quiet loglevel=0 systemd.show_status=false splash

After Pop!_OS 20.04 beta installation, I copied the new generated Pop_OS-current.conf to Pop_OS-20.04.conf and change title to Pop!_OS-20.04.

/boot/efi/loader/entries/Pop_OS-20.04.conf

title Pop!_OS-20.04

linux /EFI/Pop_OS-9e8ac298-92cf-40b8-962b-7ab0337929d7/vmlinuz.efi

initrd /EFI/Pop_OS-9e8ac298-92cf-40b8-962b-7ab0337929d7/initrd.img

options root=UUID=9e8ac298-92cf-40b8-962b-7ab0337929d7 ro quiet loglevel=0 systemd.show_status=false splash

To allow myself easily selecting which version to boot up, I modified /boot/efi/loader/loader.conf :

default Pop_OS-current

timeout 5

console-mode max

5 seconds are enough for me to use Up/Down arrows to choose the version I want. I also set console-mode max to make font bigger so it’s easier to read on my 4K screen.

That’s all about setting up multiple versions of Pop!_OS. Enjoy new Pop!_OS 20.04.