PLYMOUTH(8)

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version 24.004.60 · 2 versions
, in debian trixie

✨ PLYMOUTH(8) ✨

okay so bestie, we're in the System Administration corner of the manual, and this is plymouth — the graphical boot system and logger. yes, both. multi-hyphenate icon 💅

🎀 NAME 🎀

plymouth — a graphical boot system and logger

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so plymouth is a graphical boot system for Linux, and the way it works is it takes advantage of kernel-based mode setting (KMS) — which is available on modern graphic cards — to give you a seamless, flickerfree and attractive boot screen. literally no flicker. not even one. ✨

it lets you choose between various, static or animated graphical themes to spruce up the startup, and also to avoid all the noise generated by the vast amount of kernel messages while the machine boots into X. like, the machine is yapping and we do not need to hear it 🫶

on systems where kernel-based mode setting is not available, plymouth falls back to a text mode boot screen, which provides a simple progress bar to provide feedback during boot. lowkey humble but it does the job.

okay important bit, listen up 👑 — in order for the configured default plymouth theme to be loaded during boot, the option splash (or rhgb for backward compatibility with the RHGB boot splash) must be provided at the kernel command line. without this command line option, plymouth will default to showing detailed boot output. so no splash flag, no cute boot screen. periodt.

during the boot process, the user can switch between the graphical theme and the detailed boot output using the Escape key. you have the power. main character energy fr fr 🦋

💖 SEE ALSO 💖

🌈 AUTHORS 🌈

plymouth was originally prototyped and named by Kristian Høgsberg, originally written by Ray Strode, and has had significant contributions from Charlie Brej. it has also had contributions from Peter Jones, Adam Jackson, Frederic Crozat and others. a whole squad. a whole friend group. we love a collaborative era 💜

and that's the page bestie 🎀 this was PLYMOUTH(8) from the System Administration section — go forth, splash responsibly, and if it ever reads as plymouth down at the bottom, that's just the manual saying hi back. mwah 💋

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