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. During this time, the developers worked hard to introduce new features. These include a new plugin named “label-freetype” designed for rendering text while utilizing a smaller disk footprint for the initramfs. A new splash mode known as system-reset splash mode has also been introduced. This mode is used to show the progress of a factory reset.
With the new Plymouth release, rich support for labels has been added. This allows the use of different colors in text. It also includes an integrated terminal emulator for plugins compatible with kernels that lack fbcon. Furthermore, support for /dev/input devices has been included. This utilizes standardized XKB layout information for input.
This Plymouth update brings several improvements. Enhancements have been made to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) to better handle display rendering. Various scripts have been improved and fixed. Localization has also been improved, with the addition of translations in Georgian, Lithuanian, Hindi, Occidental, and Romanian.
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.
Image credits: Debian Project/Juliette Taka (Plymouth boot splash screen of Debian 12 “Bookworm”).
Thanks to Simon Quigley for the tip!
Last updated 10 hours ago