• Bug#1109395: debian-installer: preconfigure plymouth for graphical boot

    From Simon McVittie@21:1/5 to All on Wed Jul 16 17:30:01 2025
    XPost: linux.debian.maint.boot

    Package: debian-installer
    Severity: wishlist
    Control: affects -1 + plymouth grub-installer systemd-boot-installer
    Tags: d-i forky sid
    X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected]

    Prompted by a user question on IRC about whether/when Debian will
    "include a boot screen like ubuntu" (which it already does):

    At the moment we have a nice plymouth theme for booting without a
    wall-of-text UX, and it's installed automatically by desktop
    environments (I tested GNOME, but probably all of them have it via desktop-base), but a typical installation from d-i is missing the final
    steps to activate it:

    - edit /etc/default/grub adding "splash" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
    - sudo update-grub
    - reboot

    It seems a shame that non-technical users don't get to see this "pretty"
    boot UX without having to do steps that they won't know about.

    On desktop/laptop-class systems, before installing grub, I think it
    could make sense for debian-installer to add the "splash" option to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT (that would currently mean its complete value
    is "quiet splash"). This is the setup I use on all of my non-server
    systems and it works well.

    Similarly systemd-boot-installer could put "splash" in whatever is the
    right place for it (/etc/kernel/cmdline, I think).

    For server-class and embedded systems, I think ideally we would stick to text-mode boot, to be nicer to people with iLO or serial consoles or
    similar. Perhaps d-i could determine this by the presence or absence of
    the desktop-base package on the target system, or some similar factor?

    I think the non-DEFAULT boot mode in grub ("recovery mode") should
    continue to have neither "splash" nor "quiet", for easier debugging. I
    don't know whether systemd-boot has an equivalent.

    I know this request is too late for trixie, so I've tagged it as forky.

    Thanks,
    smcv

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)