Package: debian-installer
Severity: wishlist
Control: affects -1 + plymouth grub-installer systemd-boot-installer
Tags: d-i forky sid
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-desk...@lists.debian.org
Prompted by a user question on IRC about whether/when Debian will
"include a boot screen like ubuntu" (which it already does):
At the moment we have a nice plymouth theme for booting without a
wall-of-text UX, and it's installed automatically by desktop
environments (I tested GNOME, but probably all of them have it via
desktop-base), but a typical installation from d-i is missing the final
steps to activate it:
- edit /etc/default/grub adding "splash" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
- sudo update-grub
- reboot
It seems a shame that non-technical users don't get to see this "pretty"
boot UX without having to do steps that they won't know about.
On desktop/laptop-class systems, before installing grub, I think it
could make sense for debian-installer to add the "splash" option to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT (that would currently mean its complete value
is "quiet splash"). This is the setup I use on all of my non-server
systems and it works well.
Similarly systemd-boot-installer could put "splash" in whatever is the
right place for it (/etc/kernel/cmdline, I think).
For server-class and embedded systems, I think ideally we would stick to
text-mode boot, to be nicer to people with iLO or serial consoles or
similar. Perhaps d-i could determine this by the presence or absence of
the desktop-base package on the target system, or some similar factor?
I think the non-DEFAULT boot mode in grub ("recovery mode") should
continue to have neither "splash" nor "quiet", for easier debugging. I
don't know whether systemd-boot has an equivalent.
I know this request is too late for trixie, so I've tagged it as forky.
Thanks,
smcv
