Ubuntu 19.10 To Ship With Flicker-Free Boot Support

Thanks to the upstream work achieved by Red Hat engineers working on Fedora the past few cycles, Ubuntu 19.10 should have a flicker-free boot experience.

Ubuntu 19.10 is in the process of picking up packages for the flicker-free boot experience that was led by Red Hat engineers like Hans de Goede for delivering a very polished boot experience particularly when booting in UEFI mode and also with supported graphics driver configurations, which for now is best with the Intel DRM code.

Red Hat contributed fixes/improvements to the upstream Linux kernel, the Plymouth boot splash screen, pushing along Intel Fastboot, and related infrastructure work.

Ultimately this allows the boot process to complete without any unnecessary mode-sets/flickers, maintaining the same motherboard/system initialization screen, and all-around a boot process that is on-par with the likes of macOS and Windows 10.

The updated Plymouth support is the last piece now in Eoan testing for Ubuntu 19.10. So assuming no last minute issues, which is unlikely considering all of the upstream work and testing with this already used by other distributions outside of Fedora, Ubuntu 19.10 should have a slick boot process.

Coincidentally, this cycle marks ten years since Canonical initially rejected the notion of Plymouth for improving the boot experience as back in 2009 instead they wanted to just focus on a ten-second boot time.