That's going to be specific to each distro whether it's possible or not. It's usually hidden in advanced partitioning, if available at all. It's like every new distro has to be completely turnkey to appeal to gamers.

I don't get why GRUB is so popular, GRUB 2 is so incredibly bloated and convoluted when it really doesn't need to be, and it's not even nice like rEFInd and other graphical bootloaders. When they started shipping GRUB 2 by default I switched to syslinux, then systemd-boot/efistub.

Easy, replace it with systemd-boot: https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_465

systemd-boot is simpler to configure and keep up to date. On my PC I only needed to create 5 lines of config for my Linux drive, and it automatically configures the boot option for my Windows drive.

I tried to use rEFInd years ago on my first UEFI machine, gave up and ended with GRUB... maybe it was just a crap setup and I need to try again...

But, how about backing up just the boot sectors / EFI partition with a dd command and then just restoring it again? Not a slick solution, I agree

TBH, if a distro doesn't give me options during install then I'd probably stop there as every update to GRUB could be automatically installed and blat your machine again.

Pop Os uses SystemD and not GRUB

Debian installer in expert mode definitely asks you whether, and howz you want to install grub.

Is there some trick that can request grub not to install?

That really depends on your distro's installer, so there's no simple answer to your question. If you're using Arch for instance, you have complete control over that process. For other distros, you'll need to do your homework.

In saying that, one option could be to do a manual partition restore - like install your distro inside a VM (but don't reboot after the install, just shutdown the VM), and then clone the partition from the VHD to your real drive. After that you can just create an entry in rEFInd. But that's more effort than simply just changing the default bootloader.

I use arch btw. So you choose what boot loader to install and if you even want one. I've stopped using grub for decades because it has always been such a mess. Used refind for some time. Nowadays I just use systemd-boot.

Archinstall let me choose systemd-boot and i like it a lot better than Grub2

--- Thank you to everyone for replying. I'm pretty satisfied now that there is no trick to prevent grub installing unless an option is given during installation. Maybe in future, more distros will have the option 🤷‍♂️

Another option is to avoid the installer entirely and install from a live environment using chroot and whatever your distro’s installation bootstrap tool is. I started using this method to install Debian on ZFS root using this method for a while and it’s become my go-to method for installing most distros as it gives you the most control over the resulting OS. It will also often take some distro-specific knowledge but is also a valuable learning opportunity.