Today marks the end of an era for me. I said goodbye to my beloved lilo (which never, ever gave me the slightest problem in almost 25 years of use) and installed GRUB, which doesn't feel as comfy, to be honest.
Well, first problem detected: for some (obviously stupid) reason GRUB decided that having NumLock on is too wasteful and turns it off for the planet's sake.
It's easy to modify rc.local to set it on again, but I didn't have to when I used lilo. And what if I wanted it on from the very start?
Also, if GRUB turns it off, shouldn't there be an option in GRUB to revert that? If it exists, I can't find it.
The reason I use Slackware is because I understand why everything happens. I could look at lilo.conf and understand what it did and modify it according to my needs. I can understand GRUB configuration, too, but then these things happen out of nowhere and I feel cheated.
So, today I went back to the relevant thread on LQ (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/grub2-in-slackware-discussion-and-instruction-4175727986/), because I thought I could finally understand what they were talking about, and was amazed at the amount of spaghetti people write to solve what it turned out to be a very simple task.
I guess the moral of the story is: read the documentation. It really pays off.