Changing boot order with GRUB on Fedora

In this post I talk about how you can change the default selected OS and reorder the boot list in GRUB for Fedora.

The Default GRUB ordering

By default when the GRUB bootloader is installed it will search for all installed operating systems. Their default ordering is based on the order that they are found. Typically when installing a second operating system this will be listed first.

However there may be cases where you want to re-order the bootloader list.

Changing the GRUB ordering

One of the ways you can modify the GRUB order is by manually modifying the GRUB configuration files. However this can be complex so we can use the grub-customizer tool to do this easily.

To install this tool you can run the following command.

dnf install grub-customizer

Once installed and ran you will be presented with the following screen

This shows the current boot order and you can re-order this by right-clicking an entry and moving it up/down.

In addition to changing the ordering a number of other options can be set including setting the default boot entry. By pressing “General settings” the following screen is shown.

Here I was able to choose which boot entry will be used for the default. I have selected Windows so that by default my Windows install will be booted.

Once you have finished making changes pressing the “Save” button at the top of the screen will write all new changes to the bootloader.

Rebooting the machine will load the newly changed bootloader. Further changes can be made again by launching grub-optimizer and configuring GRUB again.