The grub menu displayed as if the system knew which partition contains the bootloader. The root partition mounted by itself. Neither dmesg nor my init/process manager threw any errors. The boot partition was not mounted, neither was swap.
I did manually create an fstab from within the installed system and all is fine, so my question is purely academic. Do modern systems not need an fstab in order to know which devices and partitions to mount where?
highly recommend setting up both grub and a second bootloader, it’s ok to have multiple! really handy when shtf
Me doesn’t follow anything you suggested. :D Never had a second bootloader in almost 20 years and never didn’t encounter an issue where it would solve the problem. Although I just distro hopped once, or twice if you count same family of distro.
Recently (years ago) switched from grub to systemd-boot (note, it is badly named, as it is not a systemd component and just a different project taken over and renamed from gummiboot, so technically it should be usable without systemd), as it is much simpler and less prone to issues than grub (and because it is the default recommendation by EndeavourOS too). I have only one operating system installed and from day to day work, I never noticed a difference in the operation.