Need warning that, in dual-boot, Grub OS menu might not appear #17
Description
In the section about an "alongside" install (dual boot), the installation manual says: "A boot menu is set up to choose between the two operating systems each time you start your computer."
My experience was that no such boot menu appeared. After some effort to research this problem online (which required me to be somewhat clever about which search terms to use), I eventually found that other users experienced this, and that there's a known workaround, that is to press the Shift key during boot. In my case, I found that either left Shift or right Shift will work (but others have reported that only one or the other Shift key worked for them). Before this, I had never heard of having to press Shift during a boot of any computer.
Some users (especially Linux newbies) might not easily find this solution online (depends on how clever they are in their search terms). Also, they may feel distressed when, on their first boot into Linux (and subsequent boots, assuming they didn't find the solution), they do not see a way to boot into the other OS, and may wonder if the other OS got wiped out (as I wondered, initially). Therefore, a warning should be added to the above-mentioned wording, e.g.: "Note that on some computers, it may be necessary to press either the left or right Shift key during boot, during a period when the screen is black, in order for the boot menu to appear."
I presume that the failure of the boot menu to appear is caused by a bug, and I have no idea whether a bug report has been filed (or even what component it should be filed against). Even if the component that's causing this problem gets fixed, as long as there are any supported Linux Mint ISOs that do not have the fixed component included in the ISO, the above-suggested warning should remain in the installation guide.
My experience was a first-time dual-boot install, Mint 22.1 Xfce on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220 with Windows 7 Professional SP1 (discussed online at https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=457614 ). This is an older computer with no UEFI.
Someone else reported a similar experience installing Mint 22.2 Xfce on top of 21.3 (at https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=457266 ). This was on a similar computer (also Lenovo, also Windows 7, and from the same era, so probably no UEFI).
I don't know how reproducible this is, as I didn't try multiple installs. But we have at least two instances of the boot menu not appearing as the installation guide said it would. And in both instances, the "Shift key" workaround worked. There are other similar reports out on the net (that's why I found the solution), but I didn't keep a record of those reports. The point is, there are multiple people experiencing the same thing, and we should help new Linux users to not have to go through this kind of confusion and distress, and the suggested warning would help.