Anything that can get more complicated will get more complicated. Boot loaders seem to be an example. It used to be straightforward to read /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg. Now, building the list of kernels for the menu is farmed out to blscfg (a grub module). I needed to have a Fedora box default to booting a kernel that isn't the latest (because the latest cannot bring up the display on my computer). 1. I needed to make updates not delete the working kernel. Normally updates keep only the last three kernels. As of today, two are duds. Fix: change /etc/dnf/dnf.conf's installonly_limit from 3 to 0 2. Find the list of kernels known to grub: sudo ls /boot/loader/entries/*.conf 3. set the default to one of those. Use the filename, without the directory and without the .conf sudo grub2-set-default 2733f1c892a5422c98bdb188c4f62737-5.10.9-201.fc33.x86_64 I don't know how long this sticks.