Heyas,

I recently worked on a boot splash theme to align with the rest of the boot artwork and would like to get some input on the actual design of things.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/10158842355 ... 82UXt5v5RD

If you want to try it yourself it is part of the current neon5 ISO http://files.kde.org/snapshots/neon5-la ... mirrorlist

Please note that due to technical limitations you'll want to try this on actual hardware as it will not work in virtual machines and even on hardware it will not work with every graphics card. In particular it will likely only work on systems with Intel graphics. And this is also where the trouble waits

Boot splashes are tricky business as in early boot three situations can present:

• awesome graphics support: this is the best case scenario where we can do just about anything
• good graphics but no transparency: which is still good but nothing (not even images) can have transparency
• bad graphics support: worst case scenario without support for images at all. In this unfortunately way to often applying case we can not do anything fancy, no images, no transparency.

Due to these limitations we will likely need/want three different versions of an early boot splash, or at least 2 versions for the sensible graphics support and a color profile for what we expect a minimal theme and grub to look like.
Color profile basically would be background color, foreground color (i.e. text), highlight color (e.g. for a progressbar) and alert color (e.g. for important text such as an "Enter password" prompt when using an encrypted hard drive). Specifically distributions usually have the bad graphics case figured out pretty well, so instead of reinventing the wheel I think it'd be best if we simply gave some guidance on what colors they might want to use with their respective bad-graphics splash versions to align with the workspace.

To give you an idea of what the three cases look like in practise, here you can see the three versions used by Kubuntu http://imgur.com/a/MmeMB

I know it would be hard but i'm still waiting for someone to make the the different phase of boot process more consistent.
I would use the last logged in user wallpaper as the background of the boot screen.
Quick example starting from grub end ending on the desktop screen
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/633 ... m-boot.mp4

EraX wrote:I know it would be hard but i'm still waiting for someone to make the the different phase of boot process more consistent.
I would use the last logged in user wallpaper as the background of the boot screen.
Quick example starting from grub end ending on the desktop screen
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/633 ... m-boot.mp4

This approach would have quite some issues (technical as well as privacy-related) because boot and login are the same for all users while the wallpaper is user-specific. Please read the discussion about using the wallpaper for the login screen (the issues are pretty similar for login and boot splash) here:
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2014-June/032892.html (this email and the replies to it contain the discussion).

It would be nice to have a Plymouth KDE theme similar to the one used by the SDDM greeter and, has I understand, initial smooth transition support was already added to SDDM.

We also we need to keep in mind that some distributions will use their own logos and designs for this, but it doesn't hurt having a KDE default one.

colomar wrote:This approach would have quite some issues (technical as well as privacy-related) because boot and login are the same for all users while the wallpaper is user-specific. Please read the discussion about using the wallpaper for the login screen (the issues are pretty similar for login and boot splash) here:
http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2014-June/032892.html (this email and the replies to it contain the discussion).

Yes i know that there would be some challenges to overcome but i think the final effect would be worth trying
I've read the discussion and i really don't see any issues concerning privacy. There could be a check box in the wallpaper window to also use the selected wallpaper as a login/boot image - unchecked by default.
Images could've been created and cached when login off of the session or when applying the wallpaper - applying blur / saturation that probably would count in milliseconds - saving different versions of the image for different phases of booting the system, and if the image is already cached just pointing to it.

The feature also would only work for people with root rights, I assume, because it would need to write somewhere outside /home. It all is possible, of course.

colomar wrote:The feature also would only work for people with root rights, I assume, because it would need to write somewhere outside /home.

Not necessarily, technically speaking the file can be anywhere it just needs to be readable for everyone. The user icon used in the login manager for example is (among other places) stored as /home/user/.face.icon.

apachelogger wrote:

colomar wrote:The feature also would only work for people with root rights, I assume, because it would need to write somewhere outside /home.

Not necessarily, technically speaking the file can be anywhere it just needs to be readable for everyone. The user icon used in the login manager for example is (among other places) stored as /home/user/.face.icon.

I would still make it require root password (or sudo, or whatever polkit authorization method, just like changing the system time) , since changing the boot or login screen is affectiong something system-wide.

then it could be nice to be able to ask to change the login/splash screen from the wallpaper configuration dialog, but that should be something explicitly asked for by the user in that dialog, not automatic

On the topic of boot splashes again. Having talked on IRC a bit, perhaps a simple black background with logo and progressbar would be enough for that. There's a number of continuity problems with properly scaling and positioning things in early boot, if we simply had a black background and logo the login manager would then simply replicate this as immediate first view and then animate towards the actual breeze theme.