@meetdilip: put an image 640x480 .png not interlaced in /boot/grub
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Displays
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My two cents reading this chart. I never used “install alongside”, I always made a new partition with either gparted or windows and did a clean install. It is just my assumption, considering friends and online tutorials, but I believe many people do this.
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I also never used “install alongside”. I have a seperate SSD for the Ubuntu install with a seperate home partition on it and always use “manual installation”.
I think small details make people love more or less an operating system.
It may be something that sounds irrelevant, but these little details show how much is invested in the OS, that nothing is left out.
And if smaller distros can give importance to these details, I think Ubuntu should be able to.
I’m not a developer, but it seems that this is not something complicated.
So, if there are resources, both financial and time, I think Ubuntu should care about that.
But it’s just an opinion 
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A nicer GRUB appearance would sure be appreciated by many, but I’m not entirely sure it should carry Ubuntu branding front and centre 
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GRUB is a bootloader provided with Ubuntu, that can load Ubuntu, but it’s not Ubuntu. Besides, other distros and OSes can access/edit/append/affect GRUB. Making it seem overly Ubuntu-specific is… presumptive lol.
On a single-install OS you could get away with it, but certainly not on a dual boot. A boot loader (where more than one OS is listed) should try to be vendor neutral.
Edit to add: IMO ofc
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Note that in Ubuntu 20.04 we’re aiming for a seamless boot experience from the BIOS through plymouth. This means grub (which is in the middle) now puts nothing on the screen by default. So any grub theme would only be seen if someone hit Escape to bring up the menu.
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It would still be nice to have a theme for the first time experience when you boot an ISO now that syslinux has been replaced by grub.
Current user experience when one boots a desktop ISO is quite crude.
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This sounds like a project worth pursuing. World it be possible to use grub 2 theming here?
And with the good point Joey made above in mind, would it be possible to theme the first boot from ISO, differently from the alongside installation grub menu?
Because it would make sense to use Ubuntu branding for the ISO, but as mentioned, not for the alongside boot experience where Ubuntu might not be the primary OS.
We’ll that’s because the VM manager is already an easy way to switch from one VM to another. I wouldn’t count that in this issue.
Even with the VMs it’s still a very big number probably millions of people. Since we’ll never know, I’ll try a stab not at the exact number but at the probability that this feature would be used by many. By millions of people. So here it goes:
In 2011 at UDS in Budapest Mark said that he aims for 200 000 000 Ubuntu users by 2015.
If we lower Mark’s goal to 60 000 000 and give him 5 more years to make it until 2020.
That’s still 4.722.000 people who ‘install alongside’. Just to illustrate that number; that’s more people than population in my country.
Here’s my thinking. I don’t trust that 7.88% number simply because “install alongside” worked for me just once since the feature came out so I guess many don’t install Ubuntu in multi boot setup that way. I dualboot Windows and Ubuntu on separate drives but I always take out the Windows SSD and do a “erase device install” when I’m installing Ubuntu and then put the Windows SSD back into the system and run grub-update for it to pick up Windows.
And most people that I know that have a real need for multi boot do it this way because it just works reliably and it has spread from user to user. So this is just from my personal subjective experience but it really shows my that the 7.88% might be way off.
Slightly off-topic now: It would be great if Ubuntu would recognize other OSs on the system and had an option to restart into any other available OS.
If so, there are folks from different working fields are using Ubuntu. Will Ubuntu only make optimisation for the majority working fields? I think it’s not right by not paying attention to the needs of minority. Ubuntu must consider them too.
The “needs” of minority? How does a dentist “need” a grub theme for his work? Or a programmer?
I understand, that you prefer a “nice” looking grub theme. But I guess, the grub theme needs a lot of testing on a lot of different hardware and architectures. In other words, a lot of time (of paid developers?) and you don’t gain very much.
And what about all the flavours? Should they use the grub theme too?
Fortunately it is open source and nobody is stopping you to create a Ubuntu grub theme.
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I agree. A grub theme will need a lot of work. But it will be great if they work for it sometime. I’m not asking to make it as soon as possible. Although it needs a lot of work, they can work for it to bring that feature in the upcoming LTS version or later than that. I’m not a developer to make it done. People those are using Ubuntu grub will feel more comfortable if it available. There are only few people who are using Ubuntu grub but it will be great if Ubuntu consider their Requests too.
Grub is never visible during the Ubuntu boot process, unless you press Escape right at the beginning. So changing its appearance is kind of pointless for most users.