As far as I know, severe errors are shown by usplash (that's the package), no matter if quiet option is enabled or not (because I had no errors yet on boot, I had no opportunity to test it ;-)).
Concerning the "unneeded service" issue: Do you really think a user who does not care what he/she installs would care if an unneeded service is running (and would know how to disable it, if it is a service needed by an app, that installed the service as a dependency)? And concerning the arguement of not switching from MSWin to Ubuntu because of not showing boot-up messages: Do you want Ubuntu to show up Bluescreens with hexcodes nobody really understands? -- bootsplash fails to show important messages in edgy https://launchpad.net/bugs/61678 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs