My experience with the linux boot has never been flicker-free. It’s bugged me for years, but I don’t have the technical knowledge to fix it. There’s a black screen between BIOS and plymouth, then a black screen between plymouth and the login screen, then another black screen between the login screen and the splash screen, and finally a black screen between the splash screen and when the desktop shows up.
Mac and windows do a much better job at having a seamless experience from boot to desktop.
I usually just disable all this useless eyecandy shit. I like seeing the raw boot messages scroll across my screen. Let’s me know early if something is fucked.
I wish Windows (11) would have this. Literally having a broken Windows Partition right now after starting Rick an Morty VR adventure game…
I only use Windows for VR gaming
What’s the
?ref=chooser-v1in the url? Works fine without it.
Comes from https://chooser-beta.creativecommons.org/
Which browser isn’t it working on?
It works fine for me, it’s just unnecessary argument AFAIK.
And the price for that beautiful, flicker-free experience is … some Macs will brick themselves. You can get them into a state where (IIRC) the dual-boot between an older macOS and a newer one (or Ashai) disagree on display modes, and the bootloader dies. Only Apple can fix that.
That’s macs. Fuck em. With linux I can always put in a USB stick with a live linux and fix shit.
I’m also trying to get the flicker-free boot. switching to systemd-boot improved the jerkyness, but the blank before the decrypt password remains.
I’ve enabled suspend-then-hibernate and whereas earlier I’ve had to endure this jerkyness rarely, now I have to witness it multiple times a day when resuming from disk. at least it’s faster than cold boot.
Plymouth has been flicker-free for me, for a long while now. I use to force it to default to bgrt theme and even that is selected by default now. This is what I use
loglevel=3 rd.udev.log_level=3 rd.systemd.show_status=false splash.Are you using full disk encryption? The password prompt for me is in text mode.
Yes. I get the LUKS prompt with the plymouth theme as well. But I should probably mention am using dracut and systemd-boot as my bootloader.
The only time the flicker-free boot doesn’t work as expected is when I interrupt the boot process to go to the bootloader menu.
Hmm… I’ll have to fiddle around on NixOS to find out how that works 🙁 But “dracut” and “systemd-boot” might help me along. Will test it in a VM sometime. Cheers
You can configure Linux to be flicker free through a few kernel parameters (mainly quiet and loglevel=3, but likely also something to set the resolution early during the boot process or to maintain the resolution the computer started with.
The groundwork was laid years ago, distros juet don’t enable it by default. Grub will even put the vendor logo back for you after selecting a boot device!
That really hasn’t reached other distros yet 😢 There are a bunch of config options for the kernel, grub, and display manager + versions that all have to work in concert in order to achieve flicker-free booting and I just wish that finally caught on as the default.
