Considering the UI is getting a lot of love, any chance to extend it to boot animation as well ?
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I wonder if we could consider removing the bootsplash. Most real machines I have have flickering made worse by the small amount of time they go the splash screen. I’d much rather we spend the effort making the bootup fast enough we don’t miss it. - definitely possible with SSDs, harder with HDDs.
With 17.10 Plymouth is now removable - IIRC it was not in the past.
The only negatives I see are:
- entering a LUKS encryption password - it’s still possible (if you disable splash on kernel command line), but it definitely doesn’t look as pretty.
- doesn’t provide notice if the system is hard locked. But for “softer locks” like systemd trying to start something for 5 minutes I find the current system doesn’t timeout to show the issue.
I actually did some tests about a month ago and found out that in a VM remove plymouth has a nice impact on boot times (systemd-analyze):
Plymouth removed - 2.2 seconds
Default - 4.7 seconds
I don’t expect that much impact on a real machine though.
I removed Plymouth modules from initramfs on 16.04 based GalliumOS to speed up booting on my Chromebooks with similar results. Also after stripping unused components like firmwares from initramfs and further tunings on my Thinkpad with the latest Ubuntu kernel and userspace only take a few seconds. Blink and you miss the bootsplash. So generally I agree here.
I will base the Bootscreen on Darwin Plymouth (https://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Darwin+Plymouth?content=170649) as I am thinking of a concept - flat ubuntu logo, purple background, blue progress bar (same as the progress bar in the software updater) that constantly moves (similar to the Ubuntu 9.10 but flat and light blue).
Please see the topright corner, progress bar can be blue.
So in detail:
Background is purple #2c001e flat
Ubuntu logo is the same but flat
Progress bar is similar to Ubuntu 9.10 but flat and blue.
Link is here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ofPDabd5ZpQcPNhc-XIuNwkURTb0v6O0?usp=sharing (editable for every update)
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A long time ago when Plymouth was shiny and new, I created a few suggestions (This isn’t a suggention!!!). Some of them were quite tasteless I know that now. I think that one thing that is key, is that there’s a coherent experience.
I really don’t mind the current design, but if a makeover is coming in 18.10, it should IMO “fit” with the GDM, theme and so on.
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I’m unsure how feasable this is (if we can have something as smooth as that as I have touched more the plymouth logic code), but I must say I really love it!
Ahhh, It’s easy to misunderstand my intentions here @didrocks. I should not have put the link in there, as this is NOT a suggestion for 18.10. I will create some (new) mockups when I have the time, that fits the new theme and maybe the cursor spinner etc.
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@madsrh plymouth is basically a super simple sprite renderer, I doubt you will get much more than 10-15fps if you are loading a new image each frame. What works well, is loading a small number of images and rotating/moving them. For example the Ubuntu GNOME splash (if you have ever seen that) which I coded up a long time ago, uses 3 images, the logo, the background and the “spinner” which is just a rotating sprite. It will happily spin around too fast, and we had to slow it down quite a bit, too make it pleasing, but you wont see the same performance loading a new image each frame (atleast I doubt it)
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