Plymouth Linux Graphical Boot Manager Now Better Handles Display Rendering

[polymath]

Plymouth, the open-source graphical boot animation and logger application, has been updated to version 23.51.283, a release that brings various new features and improvements.

It’s been more than a year since the last Plymouth release and the devs worked hard during this time to bring us new features like a new plugin called “label-freetype” for rendering text while using a smaller disk footprint for the initramfs, as well as a new splash mode called system-reset splash mode for indicating factory reset progress.

The new Plymouth release also introduces rich text support for labels for the use of different text colors, an integrated terminal emulator for plugins that work with kernels that don’t have fbcon, and support for /dev/input devices by using standard XKB layout information for input.

Some improvements are also present in this new Plymouth update, such as upgrades to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) to improve the handling of display rendering, various fixes and enhancements to scripts, localization improvements with the addition of Georgian, Lithuanian, Hindi, Occidental, and Romanian translations.

Last but not least, Plymouth is now integrated with the Meson build system to provide system integrators with more efficient and manageable builds. For more details about the Plymouth 23.51.283 release, check out the release notes on the project’s Gitlab page, from where you can also download the source tarball.

Plymouth remains the most used boot splash screen amongst GNU/Linux distributions, offering users not only an eye-candy boot process, but also a flicker-free graphical boot process. It uses kernel mode setting (KMS) to set the native resolution of the display or the EFI framebuffer on UEFI systems.