After you have installed plymouth-theme-spinner, you also need to run:
sudo update-grub
That should remove the purple screen and the dots (unless you already experience this bug).
See also the other related bugs.
On a Dell XPS 13 (9370) the one with the 4K screen… the experience is… close but no cigar. I had previous changes in my grub config so after I reverted all of those so I should be starting from scratch, installed and selected the spinner plymouth theme… and disabled grub’s os-prober… And yes, update-grub is being run for every grub change.
I get a situation similar to that described in bug #1837360: I get the Dell logo, then a moment (maybe as long as a second?) of black (not purple), then the Dell logo and the spinner below it. If relevant, the black seems a little different in the before and after states - eg: like the backlight level is lowered from the default, but possibly that ‘black’ is not quite the same black. The same applies if booting while docked so all this is happening on an external monitor.
I’ve tried a bunch of things to no avail:
-
GFX_PAYLOAD_LINUX=keep: no effect. (turns out to be what it’s doing by default anyway) -
kernel commandline includes
i915.modeset=1: No effect. This is post skylake so it’s supposed to be the default setting anyway. Sure enough, setting it explicitly isn’t making any difference. -
kernel commandline includes
i915.modeset=0: Black screen much shorter, but still present, and when it comes back the spinner is half its normal size (though still in right place). Wayland desktop comes up unscaled too. Think it’s still using efi graphics, so not ideal. -
Remove
quiet splashfrom the kernel command line. As you’d expect, kernel boot text. Restored that to normal -
With a longer timeout set, able to confirm that the Dell logo remains on screen during the timeout; the blank screen occurs when launching the kernel.
-
Set up systemd-boot instead of grub, kernel commandline cribbed from grub, so
root=UUID=(uuid) ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7. No change (once I’d got it to not show its own menu). There’s still the brief black screen before the spinner comes back up. By now i’m fairly sure it’s the kernel blanking the screen and not the bootloader! -
(BTW you can’t do EFISTUB style boots on Dell or I’d have tried that too.)
-
(in systemd-boot) remove
vt.handoff=7. after screen clears, get a few text messages in topleft, then spinner. Tried thei915.modesetoptions on systemd-boot too, same results as on grub.
Nothing seems to be able to stop that blink before the spinner comes up.
1 Like
s/i915.modeset=1/i915.fastboot=1/g mixup just in writing the above post because of trying i915.modeset=0 after seeing it mentioned in #1836858
i915.fastboot=1 doubly confirmed to not make a difference.
According to a statement on the Desktop team Trello flicker-free will most certainly NOT a default feature of Eoan.
We still need to get to a conclusion here.
What we know from the data we have (https://ubuntu.com/desktop/statistics) is that most of our users are not going to be able to get flickerfree boot with the current stack, either because they have their machine configured in BIOS mode or not the right hardware
It means we need to ask ourselves how is the experience when there is flicker with the old theme and with the new one.
-
Are they equivalent? Do we believe that the old theme or the new theme is better?
-
If we use the new theme, do we need other changes to make it look right/Ubuntu (spinner change? login screen tweaks discussed earlier?)
-
Is there bugs we need to fix in case we want to make it default?
When we discussed the topic with @willcooke and updated the card the thinking was that the main benefit of the new theme was flickerfree boot, without that it means we are loosing a brand element for what feels like no real benefit.
We were slightly leaning toward making the package used for oem pre-install on machines where it’s known to work well and stick to the old ubuntu-branded look by default.
What do other think?
2 Likes
As a plain user without any corporate identity concerns, I would want my box at least to try to be flicker-free.
And even if it fails to prevent flicker it is at least new and exciting.
And we would get input from the users in advance of the new LTS.
I have no problem with this not being installed by default in 19.10. There are still too many bugs visible and it’s unlikely even the biggest ones will be fixed in time for this cycle. If anyone wants it then be aware of the above bugs and it’s easy enough to install manually.
I would also have no problem with it being installed by default, and just trying to fix bug 1837360 at a minimum.
1 Like
Try it with full disk encryption or any sort of partition encryption which requires passwd input during grub loading, in my part I have rootfs encrpted with luks+lvm, /home partition encypted with luks and some automated unlock process:
First, the password input interface before plymouth animation is currently as ugly as you can imagine, and even fonts error since I’m Chinese… I know that’s not handled by plymouth but the grub module and password interface should be modified as well, at least more modern-like. As far as I know once your disk is encrypted, there will be a seperate /boot partition without the lvm group, which means easy modification.
Second, it just FAILs to display the plymouth animation and GDM login interface after I entered my password and unlocked the disks, unless I press a key while regular systemd startup process, which activate the cli mode or press again to change back to plymouth , this is annoying.
Third, GDM background should be redesign to match the conception of flicker-free boot, maybe some color gradient like in Macos.
@black96, thanks for the testing.
I think it’s safe to say this feature won’t be enabled by default in 19.10, which is soon to be released. I’ve updated to tracking card to reflect that.
Please open new bugs for the issues you find and add tag flickerfreeboot to them.
1 Like
For me, the boot is pretty smooth but the vendor logo isn’t shown during the process only the spinner appears.
Acer A515-51G here, for me installing plymouth-theme-spinner causes the regular Ubuntu boot screen to be replaced with one that is the same color, but the font looks older and smaller. On shutdown however i see the Acer logo and the spinning circle, but there is no little Ubuntu logo in the bottom below the spinner. Should i file a bug?
Yes, please open a bug on plymouth using ‘ubuntu-bug plymouth’
Thanks for working on the flicker-free boot.
I tried to get it working on my machine by installing the plymouth-theme-spinner and running update-grub. The result is, that I still see the default boot animation (not the text one) while starting the system. On shutdown I see the vendor logo plus spinner.
Any ideas how to get this working? If I can help with any information, let me know.
Best to open a bug on launchpad including your journalctl log and details about your video cards and drivers.
It might be useful to get a debug log as well as explained there
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Plymouth#Enabling_Debugging
1 Like
How this can be uninstalled? I have removed the plymouth-theme-spinner package, but on restart the same text-only/dots-only shows.
Maybe you need to update GRUB.
sudo update-grub
Thanks for the suggestion, but that didn’t help. :-/
Set the graphical plymouth theme as default.