Comment by jeroenhd

Outside of Arch(-derived) enthusiast circles, I haven't seen systemd-boot used anywhere.

It has some really nice tools and features that Grub lacks (i.e. it has tooling for checking the state of things like secure boot and analysing the security risks of your boot configuration), but every mainstream Linux OS I've used still relies on tools like Grub to boot.

I have some gripes with systemd-boot's limitations (notably, the insistence on an unthemed, white-on-black menu system that's not exactly enticing to Linux newcomers) but it's hard to deny its merits. Grub is tied together with a spider web of scripts calling each other, loading modules, generating code that is then executed again, and one mistake in one script can cause the bootloader config four scripts down the line to fail, leaving the system unbootable; the concise configuration file for systemd-boot makes for a much better bootloader configuration system in my opinion.