Hmmm. I'm not shedding any tears over the lack of graphical boot. I like to watch the messages.
It's not just about having or not having boot messages, which are still there in framebuffer mode if you want them. In fact, with a graphical console, you can see lots more messages at once, at the perfectly crisp native resolution of your screen, with large fonts if you like.
A major part of the issue is video mode switches causing ugly flickers, with many LCD monitors taking ages to resync and turn the backlight on after a mode change. You can miss a lot of boot messages in those precious seconds. Sometimes my monitor takes so long to sync that I don't even get to see the BIOS screen or GRUB menu.
Meta rant: why do people feel the need to chime in with how much they don't want something when someone else says they do?
What I would love though would be reliable suspend/resume on an OpenGL 4.2 accelerated notebook.
Putting all drivers in the hands of the kernel subsystem maintainers would go a long way toward solving that.
with a graphical console, you can see lots more messages at once, at the perfectly crisp native resolution of your screen
That would be nice.
why do people feel the need to chime in with how much they don't want something when someone else says they do?
In this case, I'll admit I'm not a fan of splash screens in general.
I've been a teeny-tiny bit annoyed over the years at the level of effort I've seen kernel and distro developers put into graphical boot schemes when it seemed to comes at the expense of more basic stuff, like you know, working drivers for things after the boot was complete. But it's their time and energy. If they want to put it into showing a penguin holding a beer that's their business.
To me it's usually a sign of form-over-function, or functions-I-don't-want-over-functions-I-do.
I started working with the Linux framebuffer a long time ago. The penguin boot logo was cool, but the biggest benefit was being able to code in a 128x43 (or bigger) terminal without running X. I see KMS as the long-overdue fulfillment of the dream I had then of decoupling high-end video support from X.org.
Back then I was using links2 in graphical mode, fbi for viewing images, and fbgs for reading PDFs. Since I'm working with web apps and WebGL now, I'm obviously running X.
Entirely agree, I remember my first Linux install (Suse 6.x) seeing all of those messages fly onto the screen , first from the bios and then from Linux. It would go straight to a text login then I would type "startx" to get the GUI up.
Also made it much easier to tell WTF was going on with your system and displayed all those warning messages that I am guessing are just hidden away now unless you happen to look at dmesg.
What I would love though would be reliable suspend/resume on an OpenGL 4.2 accelerated notebook.