Fedora Perfecting Their Flicker-Free Boot Experience With A New Plymouth Theme

The recent release of Fedora 29 the long-desired goal of a flicker-free boot experience to the Linux desktop was finally achieved... Well, assuming you are for now using Intel graphics and set a couple extra settings and don't have any quirky hardware. While all of the key components are in place, for Fedora 30 and beyond they will likely be taking care of the "rough edges" and already there is work on a new Plymouth boot theme for pairing with this flicker-free boot process.

Red Hat's Hans de Goede who has led this most recent push by Fedora to achieve a flicker-free boot experience has taken to developing a new theme for this KMS-based boot splash screen. With the current behavior of Plymouth, which is also a Red Hat led project, there is a five second wait before displaying the splash screen and can lead to not a smooth experience when the boot process on modern Linux PCs is generally just a few seconds.

The new theme developed by Goede draws a spinner over the firmware boot splash to ease the transition from the initial power-on BIOS/firmware screen to Plymouth and onwards to the GDM log-in manager or directly to the GNOME Shell desktop.

Here's a look at the work-in-progress Plymouth theme:

More details on Hans' blog. Hopefully Fedora 30 will be bringing this flicker-free boot experience working out-of-the-box and for more hardware.