Fedora 30 To Finish Polishing Off Their Flicker-Free Boot Experience

Fedora 29 succeeded at a long elusive and rather mystical flicker-free boot experience that has continued to improve since release. With Fedora 30, that flicker-free boot experience should be in even better standing.

The flicker-free boot experience is about making use of an Intel graphics driver feature option to avoid useless mode-sets during the initialization/boot process, preserving the initial UEFI boot screen until reaching the GDM log-in manager, smooth transitions, and all-around making it an experience on-par with Windows and macOS compared to the days of flickering when launching the X.Org Server, extra mode-sets making for a less than sleek boot experience, etc.

On Fedora 29 it still requires using the Intel i915 "fastboot" option and the Plymouth integration is still getting squared away, but for Fedora 30 it looks like it should be in good shape.

Hans de Goede of Red Hat is planning to continue the flicker free boot work for Fedora 30. For this cycle he's hoping to have the Intel fastboot default changed upstream, finishing the Plymouth boot theme, and other basic work.

Unfortunately there isn't a similar option right now for the Radeon DRM driver (and not to my knowledge for the NVIDIA proprietary driver) so for now this will still be an Intel-only feature for the most polished boot experience on Fedora Workstation 30, which is due out in May.