Killed the Chimera install. Not dramatically, and not by doing anything clever. The firmware simply stopped listing it. No entry in the boot menu, no entry in the BIOS setup screen, nothing to select. The disk was fine, the ESP was fine, the kernel and the bootloader were all sitting there exactly where I left them. The machine just would not admit any of it existed.
That is a UEFI boot variable problem. The bootloader lives on the EFI system partition, but what the firmware boots is an entry in NVRAM pointing at it, and those entries are firmware state, not disk state. They get dropped. A firmware update resets them, the NVRAM fills up, some boards prune entries they decide are stale. Your install is intact and unreachable, which is a genuinely annoying combination because every instinct says the disk died.
The lesson, and the thing I will do on every install from now on: also put a copy of the bootloader at the removable media fallback path, EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI on the ESP. Firmware will boot that with no NVRAM entry at all, because that is the path it uses for USB sticks. Costs one file copy and turns this failure from unbootable into merely untidy.
Could I have fixed it from a live USB with efibootmgr? Yes, in about ten minutes. I did not, and here is the honest reason.
NetworkChuck put out a video on Omarchy the same week, I watched it, and I thought fine, I will just try that instead. Not a considered technical migration. A video and a broken bootloader on the same evening.
Omarchy is DHH's opinionated Arch and Hyprland setup: one command on top of a fresh Arch install and you get a configured Wayland desktop, LUKS full disk encryption as standard, Alacritty, Neovim, tmux and a pile of themes with Tokyo Night as the default. It is aggressively somebody else's taste, which after a year of maintaining my own is precisely what I wanted.
And this is the part that would have annoyed me a year ago. It is Arch, so it is systemd, and I no longer care. >>0388 was me switching to a musl distro with dinit and learning which of my scripts were quietly GNU-specific. I enjoyed that. I do not want to do it again. I want the machine to boot, suspend properly, and not need me.
>spent about a year having opinions about init systems >now I want something that works
The dwl setup was better in ways I could defend in an argument. This one is better in the way that matters, which is that I have not touched it in a week.
