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

[illwieckz]

I'm admittedly ignorant in the field of graphics drivers, so take this as the naive question it probably is, but why in the world is flicker free boot such a difficult problem? Windows has had it since XP, MacOS had it ever since it existed, so why do Linux OSes have such a hard time doing the same thing?

I don't know why it is hard, but let's have a look at other topics, for example how the quoted Windows XP was absolutely unable to boot somewhere else than the computer it was installed on. My first guess would be priority: developers had very different goals and sales managers very different opinion about what's important.

[tildearrow]

No modesets

I see. How is it that you can have zero-modeset on AMD?

but a brief black screen

Oh...

[Luke]

Is there a way to input password from EFI variable on laptops that have that fingerprint login for windows? I assume the fingerprint is stored in an EFI var at boot.

Absolutely no idea, as I use encryption to lock out cops and other state-level attackers and thus would never use a fingerprint or other biometric data as the key.

[slalomsk8er]

Looks like a nice improvement from the last version but still I would love to have a verbose theme and a switch to set it as default for every boot.

[louis_irl]

Looks really nice! But wouldn't it make more sense to use the GNOME spinner?

[starshipeleven]

I'm admittedly ignorant in the field of graphics drivers, so take this as the naive question it probably is, but why in the world is flicker free boot such a difficult problem? Windows has had it since XP, MacOS had it ever since it existed, so why do Linux OSes have such a hard time doing the same thing?

Because it's either deployed on a server where it's 100% irrelevant or on embedded devices where you use horrible hacks in your fork of the kernel to do your bidding.

I'm not saying it's like tits on a bull, but it basically is, given what is the moneymaker on Linux.

[AsuMagic]

Some motherboards like my ASRock one also have UltraFastBoot for slightly faster FastBoot...at the cost of locking yourself out of BIOS(no keyboard shortcut or BIOS vendor logo flash, doesn't need to init as much or something. You can use a command via CLI to reboot into UEFI if you need to. Sometimes bit dangerous though, but perhaps not as bad as when I disabled some USB feature I didn't think was needed based on the description, which prevented mouse/keyboard from working unless I had a PS/2 one around(or took out the CMOS battery to reset BIOS I guess).

That's what MSI GO2BIOS is for - even if your keyboard doesn't respond to access the setup you can still access it.
Another solution is to take out the boot drive. It should drop to the setup when it happens.

[jacob]

Because it's either deployed on a server where it's 100% irrelevant or on embedded devices where you use horrible hacks in your fork of the kernel to do your bidding.

I'm not saying it's like tits on a bull, but it basically is, given what is the moneymaker on Linux.

But that doesn't explain it, does it? I'm wondering why it seems to be so *technically* difficult that it took years for one distro to get (almost) there - and that's a desktop distro we are talking about, not a server or embedded OS.

[Vistaus]

No flicker here with Solus on my laptop with 1920x1080 resolution and Intel 620 UHD GPU.

[starshipeleven]

But that doesn't explain it, does it?

Yes it does. It's not technically difficult, it's just very low priority.

and that's a desktop distro we are talking about, not a server or embedded OS.

Yeah sure. Red Hat lived on desktop installation contracts for the last decade. Hmmm... not really.

This is a side-project of a rockstar developer employed by RH, not a RH goal in any way.

Seriously, that's the work of a single man, as good as he can be.