I guess current world events are starting to affect the flow of news in our sector, too, since there’s a decided lack of interesting stuff to talk about. So, let’s talk about this:
One of the immediate differences Ubuntu 20.04 desktop/laptop users will notice when booting in UEFI mode is the boot splash screen improvements thanks to leveraging Red Hat’s work on providing a flicker-free boot experience and pulling in the UEFI BGRT system/motherboard logo during the boot process to provide a more transitive experience. Canonical in turn is working on pushing some of their improvements back into upstream Plymouth.
The Ubuntu 20.04 LTS boot experience is on-par to what has been found in Fedora and other Linux distributions like Arch Linux for over one year.
I love it when different distributions and other projects work together to improve something that isn’t particularly sexy or high on anybody’s agenda, yet still is a welcome improvement. This is a great example of that.
“I love it when different distributions and other projects work together to improve something that isn’t particularly sexy or high on anybody’s agenda, yet still is a welcome improvement. This is a great example of that.”
I agree, it’s also good to see Ubuntu playing ball with everyone else, where in the past they tend to try to make a ‘better’ version, but don’t have the individual manpower to pull it off. They should be doing more of this. I think this is only the second time I’ve seen this, the other was some of their coders improving performance and giving patches to Gnome!
This is a welcome addition since boot flicker has always been a minor nuisance in Linux. Maybe they could add a minimalist animation while the OS boots. It wasn’t as much of an issue when Ubuntu was using Upstart because there was just a minor flicker between the BIOS screen and the login screen, but ever since they switched to SystemD my boot time has increased and it seems weird just staring at a black screen. The first time I booted after that upgrade, I thought the upgrade had trashed my system but the login screen eventually appeared – having a minor indicator that something is happening is useful in those situations.