Install Plymouth Splash Screen

Definition

Plymouth is a project from Fedora and now listed among the freedesktop.org’s official resources providing a flicker-free graphical boot process.

Installation

sudo pacman -S plymouth

KDE users can also download new plymouth themes via settings, therefor you have to download:

sudo pacman -S plymouth-kcm

Configuration

Edit /etc/plymouth/plymouthd.conf.

[Daemon]
Theme=spinner
ShowDelay=0

option	description
Theme=	specify the theme you want to use according to folder name in /usr/share/plymouth/themes
ShowDelay	0 = disabled, delay of time in seconds, if your computer boots to fast that you can’t see plymouth

Edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf.

HOOKS=(... base udev plymouth autodetect microcode ...)

The plymouth hook has to be placed between udev and autodetect

After this re-create initramfs by:

sudo mkinitcpio -p

Edit /etc/default/grub or your desired bootloader.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="loglevel=3 quiet splash"

[: file=”/etc/default/grub”]

The kernel parameter splash must be set to load plymouth

Smooth transitions

If you want smooth transitions you can place an dropin-snippet to display-manager.service.

sudo systemctl edit display-manager.service --drop-in=plymouth

Next there opens your default editor where you have to just drop-in the following code and save/close it.

[Unit]
Conflicts=plymouth-quit.service
After=plymouth-quit.service rc-local.service plymouth-start.service systemd-user-sessions.service
OnFailure=plymouth-quit.service

[Service]
ExecStartPost=-/usr/bin/sleep 30
ExecStartPost=-/usr/bin/plymouth quit --retain-splash

It should create successfully a new conf file for your display-manager.service like /etc/systemd/system/sddm.service.d/plymouth.conf.

This is not needed for GNOME or KDE.

Usage

For a list of installed themes to can have a look into /usr/share/plymouth/themes or type:

plymouth-set-default-theme -l

From the command-line you can use this to change the theme and re-create initramfs at once.

plymouth-set-default-theme -R theme

Themes can be previewed without rebuilding initrd, press Ctrl+Alt+F6 to switch to a text terminal, log in as root and type:

plymouthd
plymouth --show-splash

To quit the preview, press Ctrl+Alt+F6 again and type:

plymouth --quit

You can run these commands as root in a running X.Org session too, but the Plymouth window may cover your terminal window and lock itself on top. This doesn’t work in Wayland sessions.

Troubleshooting

If you experience any problems during boot, you can temporarliy disable Plymouth by kernel parameters.

In GRUB for example when bootloader shows up hit e on Arch Linux boot entry. Edit the line which starts with linux /vmlinuz.

linux   /vmlinuz-linux root=UUID=[...] rw zswap.enabled=0 rootfstype=ext4 plymouth.enable=0 disablehooks=plymouth

When edited start the boot process with F10. Your system should boot normaly and you can make changes.

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Further reading: ArchWiki > Plymouth