Canonical Contributing Upstream Improvements To Plymouth Ahead Of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

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.

In the process, Ubuntu developers have been working on some further polishing to this graphical boot screen code -- including by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt who is well known for all of his upstream GNOME contributions over the past few years.

Some of the work they have been pushing include fixing the centering of some labels, a new integrity-check mode, and support for displaying fsck status messages.

This also complements other Red Hat improvements recently including DRM/KMS probe speed-ups and other work.