Re: disappointing first impression
Reply #6 –
Unlike colorful opinions of which I have no shortage, I don't really qualify to give advice but in embareassing grub situations I save my hide by breaking into the grub menu with "C" and then doing a manual boot. I also use the SuperGrub frisby as it can often boot what otherwise seems unbootable (especially since grub2): https://www.supergrubdisk.org/
spanish (eManuel) grub boot (edit as per your situation):
set root=(hd0,2)
linux /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda2
initrd /boot/initrd
boot
To ease the use of this lifesaver I create in every used distro's /boot folder a link named vmlinuz and one named initrd pointing to the applicable files (most distros already do this except as you know Slackware which admirably has never even bothered with any initrd at all)
hth
As for 1st impressions, hold the static. When I first saw Suse fork from Slackware I thought "WTF is this joke?", then dumped Slackware and stuck to Suse for over 20 years ...until they got systemd'd :-)