SUSE Dropping Mainline Work On Their In-Kernel Bootsplash System

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SUSE Dropping Mainline Work On Their In-Kernel Bootsplash System

For those that were excited over the months of ongoing work by SUSE to bring up an in-kernel boot splash system that could be better than Plymouth for at least some use-cases and was interesting many readers, unfortunately it's not panning out for mainline...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SUSE-No-Mainline-Boot-Splash

[bitman]

Oh no.. Sucks that people in charge do not care about user experience at all. If them geeks find kernel message output perfectly acceptable it does not mean that everyone on the planet does. Linux does so many things so well and yet something seemingly trivial like bootsplash is a total disaster.

[davidbepo]

im currently using this on manjaro, its just so much better than plymouth, sad news

[OneTimeShot]

Not surprising given that previous efforts were rejected.

when booting off SSD, there isn’t much of a gap between kernel start and Plymouth (sub second), so I am not sure what the need is.


“If them geeks find kernel message output perfectly acceptable it does not mean that everyone on the planet does.”

Add “quiet” to your grub boot line. I think that Fedora and Ubuntu both do this by default, so I’m not sure this affects non-geeky Linux distros anyway....

[Happy Heyoka]

Oh no.. Sucks that people in charge do not care about user experience at all. If them geeks find kernel message output perfectly acceptable it does not mean that everyone on the planet does. Linux does so many things so well and yet something seemingly trivial like bootsplash is a total disaster.

So let's unpack that a bit: yes, kernel boot logs are a bit unwieldy, but zero diagnostics on boot are a _worse_ user experience than that.

When bad things happen at the most critical point in starting your machine then the most leverage should be made of any available user interface bandwidth.
There's no reason why boot diagnostics can't be useful and pretty; it's just more work than doing text.

[FirstPersonBSOD]

So let's unpack that a bit: yes, kernel boot logs are a bit unwieldy, but zero diagnostics on boot are a _worse_ user experience than that.

When bad things happen at the most critical point in starting your machine then the most leverage should be made of any available user interface bandwidth.
There's no reason why boot diagnostics can't be useful and pretty; it's just more work than doing text.

Average consumers don't think like that. To these people the first impression from booting up the OS is important because if they see strange looking text on their screen they might think their computer is broken or has a virus infection.

[bitman]

So let's unpack that a bit: yes, kernel boot logs are a bit unwieldy, but zero diagnostics on boot are a _worse_ user experience than that.

When bad things happen at the most critical point in starting your machine then the most leverage should be made of any available user interface bandwidth.
There's no reason why boot diagnostics can't be useful and pretty; it's just more work than doing text.

You are joking right? 99.99% of the time there is zero need for any diagnostic messages. Flashy garbage output to be always visible when it is almost never needed is not acceptable. Besides if things go south it always is possible to toggle between splash screen and diagnostic messages. It is just esc-key-away. If implementation was like that on windows where you just can not see anything useful when boot fails then you would be right. However this implementation takes care of diagnostic messages being accessible at any time.

[starshipeleven]

Add “quiet” to your grub boot line. I think that Fedora and Ubuntu both do this by default, so I’m not sure this affects non-geeky Linux distros anyway....

Quiet does not silence errors. Like for example ACPI errors, or some other stuff.
Many systems do have such errors due to crap UEFI or other issues.

[starshipeleven]

So let's unpack that a bit: yes, kernel boot logs are a bit unwieldy, but zero diagnostics on boot are a _worse_ user experience than that.

Diagnostics are something that can be enabled when there is a qualified technician or developer or power user looking at them. AND when there are actual issues to debug.

Most userbase can't understand them anyway, and in most cases there are no issues that need debug.

[starshipeleven]