Plymouth Planned For Ubuntu 9.10 Integration

[elanthis]

I'm not in favour of Plymouth either, being on nvidia's binary drivers.

The proper attitude here would be "I'm not in favor of NVIDIA's drivers because they don't integrate with the Linux graphics stack."

I'd assume that if Plymouth and Wayland and the like take off, NVIDIA will end up making the necessary adjustments to their driver to use the KMS interface as well as any other interfaces necessary. Right now, the driver requires the X DDX driver to work at all -- if the X DDX drivers disappear entirely, that would of course make the NVIDIA driver unusable, which isn't something NVIDIA is going to want. They really do need their drivers to work on Linux because of a wide range of high-end customers that demand support, and those customers are going to end up on more modern Linux installations eventually.

[Vadi]

I'm not in favour of Plymouth either, being on nvidia's binary drivers.

Facebrowser delay on the other hand is dissapointing.

[maleadt]

I lol'd.
Progress bar gives you absolutely nothing - it's nice when you don't care/don't know what's going when system is booting, but in any other circumstances it's just another annoyance.
Parallelizing boot process isn't problematic - for example OpenRC prepends each line of boot output with name of the corrssponding service, so nothing is lost

And who do we want to make Linux popular too? Unless you want Linux distributions remain to be an underdog in the OS-race, you'd have to improve the user experience, which involves boot splash enhancement. A phrase I read somewhere: "never underestimate the value of shiny".

I agree when you say that a regular linux user, which is already convinced about it's proper value, doesn't need the nice boot screen. Well, then you just need to activate the proper Plymout plugin so you can see all boot messages scrolling over your screen, in high-resolution! So as a user who prefers to see all boot messages, I'm happy to see this (KMS+Plymouth) getting developed and integrated.

[SavageX]

I very much prefer a nice graphical boot. I absolutely don't need vast amounts of scrolling text during a normal non-failing startup. If things go wrong this obviously doesn't apply anymore and the graphical boot should fallback to a spammy output mode.

[Eragon]

I suppose they will have a backup system in place which does not require KMS? I use Nvidia's binary driver, and I am not going to stop using it, since nouveau doesn't have 3d -> no gaming.

[Gentooer]

Yeah I've never understood why any knowledgeable linux user would want to hide all the important boot messages. Besides, with gentoo on a SSD I'm already in X in 10-15 seconds, barely enough time to turn on my monitor and sit down. I like eyecandy as much as anyone, but not when it limits usability.

[ferreira]

I disagree with this entirely. I will never use nor recommend a distro that doesn't have a well implemented boot screen. Ubuntu has done a great job with usplash.

The progress bar shown on splash screens has a huge amount of value while waiting for a system to get itself together.

Boot printout contains so much information that none of it has any meaning. Any modern distro will also parallelize the boot process, scrambling the boot soup. (or buffer it, which makes it even more pointless)

I lol'd.
Progress bar gives you absolutely nothing - it's nice when you don't care/don't know what's going when system is booting, but in any other circumstances it's just another annoyance.
Parallelizing boot process isn't problematic - for example OpenRC prepends each line of boot output with name of the corrssponding service, so nothing is lost

[deanjo]

I disagree with this entirely. I will never use nor recommend a distro that doesn't have a well implemented boot screen. Ubuntu has done a great job with usplash.

The progress bar shown on splash screens has a huge amount of value while waiting for a system to get itself together.

Boot printout contains so much information that none of it has any meaning. Any modern distro will also parallelize the boot process, scrambling the boot soup. (or buffer it, which makes it even more pointless)

What is the huge amount of value? What does it provide you? It provides nothing useful at all. At least with a scrolling boot message you can catch stuff that has possibly failed as it scrolls by, hidden boots don't warn you of things like impeding SMART failures, raid issues, failed services, etc that may not be a showstopper, but can grow into one if not remedied. At least when you see the word failed go by you can see that you should check the logs and take preventative action before the issue escalates.

[shredwheat]

Splash screen = pointless eye candy, boot performance reduction, and possibly missing important boot messages.

I disagree with this entirely. I will never use nor recommend a distro that doesn't have a well implemented boot screen. Ubuntu has done a great job with usplash.

The progress bar shown on splash screens has a huge amount of value while waiting for a system to get itself together.

Boot printout contains so much information that none of it has any meaning. Any modern distro will also parallelize the boot process, scrambling the boot soup. (or buffer it, which makes it even more pointless)

[elanthis]

Is there a list of the primary reasons for delaying Plymouth? I'm guessing it was for reasonable things, like waiting for the kernel changes to settle for another 10 months.

Were there any specific showstoppers in the short term?

Mostly that it doesn't actually work on more than like 2 cards at the moment. (I'm exaggerating a little there.)

It requires at a minimum full KMS support. Fedora 10 -- which shipped Plymouth -- therefor only supported Plymouth on older ATI cards, nothing else. Ubuntu 9.04 might get Intel KMS support, but newer ATI cards support have been "sometime soon" for over half a year now, Nouveau has no clear time table, and other cards aren't likely to get KMS any time soon. Given that Ubuntu 9.04 has just four months -- including time to stabilize and test -- it would be unrealistic to hope for KMS/Plymouth to be ready by then. 9.10 gives things a lot more time to materialize and stabilize.