A change you probably won't see, but that's sort of the point…

That’s the look of no flicker

A short, but welcome, update: Ubuntu 19.10 will offer a flicker free boot experience for some users!

Red Hat’s crop of competent engineers are (as always) to credit for effort that Ubuntu 19.10 ‘Eoan Ermine’ takes full advantage of.

Now, Ubuntu’s boot experience as-is isn’t exactly terrible, but there’s a visible bit of blinking during the process.

As an AMD user I’m used to my laptop display “flickering” off and back on a few times during boot, signalling the transition from boot loader to loading screen to login screen — alas, something this effort can’t address.

But users of Ubuntu 19.10 with modern Intel graphics cards and an UEFI setup should benefit from a truly seamless flickr-free boot experience, thanks to a new Plymouth snapshot added to the Eoan archives.

“The new [Plymouth] theme uses the vendor logo from the firmware with a spinner under it (same as windows is doing),” Ubuntu’s Sebastien Bacher says.

Fedora’s Hans De Geode has a handy flicker free boot FAQ on his live journal. It answers some common questions about what this particular engineering endeavour can (and just as importantly can’t) do.

To see a video of a flickr-free boot in action on Fedora, check out this video.