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Gorgeous-GRUB: collection of decent community-made GRUB themes
- marcodiego 2y agoWhat I really would like: something that mimicked the old SGI start up, complete with boot audio and a micro distro for OS setup. These days, with snapshot filesystems, that shouldn't be too hard. Also, I've had to chroot to fix my system in my life a few times; I can't believe that's hard to automate.
- dharmab 2y agoOn Arch, I think you could install a second "backup" copy of Arch Linux on a recovery partition that your motherboard firmware can boot into directly, and then use the `arch-chroot` program to recover your main OS. I'm sure something similar exists for other distros?
- immibis 2y agoYou can always do this on any distro, but not necessarily with the install wizard.
- Fnoord 2y agomacOS has both these features, sort of. Startup chime in SGI machines depended on model. So an Indy had a different one than an Onyx. My first PC (80286) also had iconic sounds when it started up. Never forget. Micro distro, is recovery OS. All three major desktop OSes have such, or a key combination to activate such. Android has two recovery partitions I believe, redundancy is key. If you like the power of snapshots, yep filesystems with CoW like ZFS can show a list during boot. An OS like NixOS wouldn't even need such. Works perfectly fine with Ext4FS, including boot menu with snapshots, rollback feature, etc.
- mzi 2y ago> My first PC (80286) also had iconic sounds when it started up. BEEP BOP. bidiedi-bop. bip.
- mikepurvis 2y agoI feel like your best bet with this would be one of the kexec-based bootloaders, because then it's a "real" Linux environment there, with whatever tools you want in it, instead of something special. Eg: https://github.com/kexecboot/kexecboot https://github.com/kexecboot/kexecboot
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoI do wish more effort was made to polish all the bits and pieces because all of this exists in some form. I suppose some of it is that everyone is doing their own slightly different thing; NixOS lets you boot to earlier generations, but only by completely turning the filesystem inside out, OpenSUSE can do snapshots, but using BTRFS which means that not many other distros even can use the same implementation, ZFS is the bee's knees but on Linux licensing always adds friction, Ubuntu made boot super smooth via Plymouth but it's very... Ubuntu. Anyways. If you're in a position to run Linux on ZFS, may I suggest zfsbootmenu? > ZFSBootMenu leverages the features of modern OpenZFS to allow users to choose among multiple "boot environments" (which may represent different versions of a Linux distribution, earlier snapshots of a common root, or entirely different distributions), manipulate snapshots in a pre-boot environment and, for the adventurous user, even bootstrap a system installation via zfs recv. - https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/v3.0.x/index.html https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/v3.0.x/index.html
- Hasnep 2y agoWhat's wrong with Plymouth? I use it on NixOS and it seems to just work and show a Nix logo on boot
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoInteresting, either it got a lot better or I misremembered. Last time I looked, using Plymouth on anything but Ubuntu was a lot of rough edges and manual setup. By skimming wiki pages it does indeed look like that's not true anymore (if indeed it ever was; I could have been wrong before).
- mrbluecoat 2y agoI just found ZFSBootMenu and am really enjoying it so far. Cracks me up that all the zfs tutorials online are from circa 2010. I guess I missed the memo back then. For those wanting to try it, it took me a while to find the actual installation instructions: https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/latest/guides/void-linux/uefi.html https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/latest/guides/void-linux/uef...
- ibizaman 2y agoOn NixOS we get one new grub menu entry per “deployment”, be it when you deploy to another host or the local one. They both then get a new grub entry. Of course you can still shoot yourself in the foot by making your system inaccessible remotely, by screwing up ssh config for example. There’s also a solution for that called deploy-rs which has a magic rollback feature which rolls back the system if it can’t connect back to the computer initiating the deployment https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs?tab=readme-ov-file#magic-rollback https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs?tab=readme-ov-file#mag... I’m using these features since multiple years now and can vouch for them. Not exactly related to your initial question but I also have my system build in CI and do some playwright tests which become more and more comprehensive as time passes. This all gives me quite a lot of confidence I’ll find an issue early or be able to revert back.
- oarmstrong 2y agoCould you tell me more about the playwright tests? From what I can see it's a web testing framework, I don't see how that fits in here.
- ibizaman 2y agoAh you’re right. I should’ve been more clear. I’m deploying on my server and it self hosts 10 or so services. Like Nextcloud and Vaultwarden. The playwright tests are to test those. It’s pretty basic like just checking I can create a user and still login. But it still caught a few regressions. And they’re still WIP. I’m getting close to being able to validate the LLDAP + Authelia config works too. It’s particularly useful in conjunction with automatically running flake update in CI. So all inputs get updated on a schedule and the tests give some level of guarantee that my server won’t break. It’s essentially QA tests automated. This link shows what the playwright tests look like. They are parametrized on the service to test so I’m sure I’m testing the same functionality every time. https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks/blob/c2148eda7704bdb6aa097df05ec5aac0d2285b2b/test/common.nix#L199 https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks/blob/c2148eda7704...
- oarmstrong 2y ago
- userbinator 2y agoI'm a huge proponent of customisation, but for me, the less I have to see or even think about GRUB, the better.
- vidarh 2y agoYeah, I usually see it for seconds a year. If I saw it often enough to worry about theming it, I'd rather spend my time on fixing whatever caused me to have to see it so ofen.
- vasco 2y agoYou'd spend more quality time with it if it looked beautiful. Think about it going up and down those menus for hours on end. Quality grub.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y agoMeanwhile, with kexec on a good day you can spend zero time in the bootloader for as long as the system doesn't need a full hard-off power down:)
- esseph 2y agoAh. You don't ever patch, I guess.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoOr he is managing headless systems where you don't see the boot process unless something has gone wrong.
- exe34 2y agoI never wait for a computer to boot by staring at it unless I'm fixing a problem with the boot process. I wander off and come back later.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
- PebblesHD 2y agoWhile these are cool, I honestly wish GRUB was silent unless you’re holding a key during boot. The 5 seconds it takes to go away and just boot the OS by default is really unnecessary.
- treyd 2y agoI'm pretty sure there is an option for this, holding shift makes it show the menu.
- arp242 2y agoWhat if you don't remember the key you need to press?
- necovek 2y agoYou RTFM (which can be a quick search or LLM chat away on another device like your phone).
- kej 2y agoI think you can get that by setting `GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden` and `GRUB_TIMEOUT=0`. Then you can hold `Shift` to see the GRUB menu, otherwise it will boot the default option immediately.
- dustbunny 2y agoGood tip. I've always felt like I'd like to be able to boot directly into the Second Option via a key, etc. like Shift + 2 etc
- homebrewer 2y agoMake sure this works on your system before you really need it, as some keyboard/USB-controller combinations take a few seconds to wake up from whatever slumber they're in and start working. I ran into this several times.
- NikkiA 2y ago
- arp242 2y ago"Grand Theft Gentoo": https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Jacksaur/Gorgeous-GRUB/refs/heads/main/Images/GTG.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Jacksaur/Gorgeous-GRUB/ref...
- 9dev 2y agoOh my gosh, that one’s a gem! Rage Linus on the top right, smug confused Balmer on the bottom… the Gates mugshot is icing on the cake. awesome!
- WD-42 2y agoStuff like this is why I fell in love with Linux. Some amazing creativity in here. Almost makes me wish I dual booted with something so I’d have an excuse to see grub!
- lopis 2y agoThis, wobbly windows and rain effects. I wouldn't use any of that today, but it captivated me, at a time when customizing windows was becoming more cumbersome with each release.
- Grosvenor 2y agoI can finally make my computer look like the ones from hackers! Awesome.
- nico 2y agoHaha, my first thought when I saw the themes was, wow this is exactly like the movie! Might rewatch it soon, been listening to the soundtrack while working lately :)
- spitfire 2y agoA soundtrack so good they made three separate soundtracks. The last one was entirely music that wasn’t in the movie. Fantastic.
- jwitthuhn 2y agoLove the concept of BSOL, might give that a try.
- imcritic 2y agoHow do those background images scale on different monitors/resolutions? Btw, how does grub figure out in what resolution to draw the interface?
- mshockwave 2y agojudging from some of these repos, I think the answer is: they don't. It seems like you have to manually pick images with the correct resolution
- shmerl 2y agoYou can set the resolution explicitly, otherwise it will render at resolution UEFI started the boot with.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoThis is a significant peeve of mine. The need to explicitly specify resolution in boot managers is annoying for both laptops and machines that aren’t always used with the same monitor, because no matter what it’s going to end up in fallback with an ugly stretched resolution some portion of the time, rendering beautification with themes somewhat moot. This limit made sense 20+ years ago but today it feels highly anachronistic, kind of like finding a corded rotary phone mounted on a wall in the kitchen of an otherwise cutting edge home. Surely it’s something that could be fixed?
- shmerl 2y agoMay be, but this is so minor in general, that I barely care as long as it boots properly. Way bigger annoyance is that grub still doesn't support luks2 and uses some gimped variant of libcrypto without proper hardware acceleration that decrypts boot volumes for almost a minute. That is way more serious than boot resolution annoyances.
- nextaccountic 2y agoThat's also a peeve of mine. Is there a way at all for grub to use hardware acceleration there? Or maybe the bootloader isn't allowed to do such things
- noisy_boy 2y agoI'm still waiting for a bootloader that will show up right from the beginning on my external monitor like my desktop + CRT monitor could do 20 years ago. systemd-boot (included with Pop!_OS) doesn't do that - so I have to actually take out my (Thinkpad X1 extreme) laptop from its stand and open it up to be able to switch between boot options; would be good to know people's experience with Grub on this front.
- xnickb 2y agoIt's definitely a "you" problem. It works for me over a monitor connected via a docking station. I have tries pop os a while ago but it definitely worked.
- noisy_boy 2y agoMy setup is as Linux friendly/vanilla as it comes; my laptop and dock are both Thinkpad and the monitor is Dell. Nothing exotic. It didn't even work when my monitor was directly connected via USB-C or HDMI so I guess I'm out of ideas about how it is a "me" problem.
- boomboomsubban 2y agoIf you go into your UEFI, does your external monitor work? As Linux drivers wouldn't be in play when GRUB is running.
- PhilipRoman 2y agoI suspect it may depend on the monitor, not the bootloader. Some of them have a longer delay when turning on than others. My 4k connected over displayport has no problem, but my old VGA/DVI monitor that I use for homelab recovery cannot turn on fast enough.
- micw 2y agoCheck your bios for primary display. If you manage to have the bios screen on the external display, it's very likely that the following bootloader will also use it. Works well on my ThinkPad+Dock.
- pndy 2y agoI had one from Distro Themes once in Manjaro up until one of heavy updates overwritten it with default theme. Also, github gives me "You have exceeded a secondary rate limit" message while it's the first time I'm visiting it today. Yey.
- ykonstant 2y agoI am weary of GRUB and try to avoid it. The codebase is legendary for its inscrutability, bugs and performance issues abound and its configuration ritual is ridiculous. And yet, it is king of bootloaders for a reason. It can frigging boot HannaMontanaBSD on an ENIAC. It can boot in UEFI mode, in BIOS mode, it is a chameleon that fits the hardware it is situated in. The devs have made a heroic piece of software. Perhaps the inscrutability of the code and its issues are inevitable given the scope of the project. I don't know, I just wish we had a more sane codebase with GRUB's capabilities.
- buserror 2y agoGrub is like a turd that won't flush. It's been completely unnecessary for years, is massively overcomplicated, pretty much unusable as a shell with it's 1995 idioms, and there are much, MUCH lighter (and as useful) replacements (extlinux etc) -- and you can even just remove it completely and boot the kernel directly these days with the EFI stub... But still, it gets installed, trying to justify its existence.
- onli 2y agoOkay. I have a laptop here with windows, haiku and Linux. And actually the grub (2) configuration to get haiku to start was strange. What exactly do I install best to replace grub? Or alternatively, I have a PC with only Void Linux. Compatibility mode for booting, since uefi mode did not work (I dont know why - some secure boot shenanigans? MBR vs GPT mode? There is no EFI partition as well). What could replace grub there?
- johnisgood 2y agoI am on Void Linux too, and grub works fine. sighs. Why would I replace what has worked for decades?
- onli 2y agoI personally would like to be able to enable the UEFI boot mode of the board, so that I can enable Resizeable bar - for the performance benefit and to have the option to add an Intel GPU later. So cleaning up the GRUB situation could help me there - that's why my comment above was completely serious, I'd really look at suggestion. Because otherwise I see it like you, why change what works. Even the move to Grub 2 with the more complicated config options wasn't all that bad, since it really needed less often to be configured manually. So after a bit I was fine with that.
- the_gipsy 2y agoIn same boat here. I just do not understand the *EFI stuff anymore, and I've tried. I somehow got refind to work, after disabling some vaguely named "secure boot" option in the BIOS. It shows my several linux options, and the only one that works is "rescue", that boots what is apparently a systemd bootloader with Nix generations. When I select Windows, I get some windows boot menu/loader instead of directly booting Windows. I have no clue how it all works - there is some partition with some files, but I also must run some command to "apply" changes - I think. It's horrible.
- coolgoose 2y agoEverybody complaining about grub forgot about lilo
- whalesalad 2y agoRIP. Pouring one out for Linux loader.
- dig1 2y agoLilo is still alive and kicking on Slackware ;)
- Tsiklon 2y agoDoes LILO work on EFI systems or is GRUB preferred in that case? I’ve not built a Slackware box in a long time… maybe this evening I’ll see about putting a VM together
- dig1 2y agoSlack ships elilo package for EFI systems. AFAIK config (elilo.conf) should be pretty much the same as standard lilo.conf
- whalesalad 2y agoI can’t think of a single reason to entertain Slackware or lilo. I have extensive experience with both.
- fuzzfactor 2y agoI still prefer Syslinux but it's still not officially supporting UEFI yet :( The only time I would want Grub is for that reason primarily. But it makes sense to be very familiar with Grub so you can not be screwed up by systems you encounter which may have been set up, "grub-reinstalled", or configured by those who are not as familiar as they should have been. Once you do have a regular ordinary multiboot system or SSD that includes one or more Linux installs, with Grub working well, then adding the themes like this is only the icing on the cake.
- typh00n 2y agoI use and like rEFInd as my primary bootloader to dualboot Windows and Fedora. Hackernews is obviously full of technical volks with need for encryption and what not, but I just like the macOS bootloader inspired looks that i could not replicate with grub.
- christina97 2y agoVery timely. I’m currently in the middle of upgrading Ubuntu inside chroot to get a new version of grub that doesn’t have a bug with encrypted ZFS hoping it’ll fix my boot… Note to the universe: don’t touch ZFS with a 10 foot pole unless it’s your full time job to maintain storage clusters.
- dgekfeg 2y ago[flagged]
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agohttps://hmarco.org/bugs/CVE-2015-8370-Grub2-authentication-bypass.html https://hmarco.org/bugs/CVE-2015-8370-Grub2-authentication-b...
- tmountain 2y agoPersonally... love it. Great for the people that want to flex this kind of aesthetic.
- lofaszvanitt 2y agoJust like good ol installers, like the one made for C&C. When things had some soul.
- causality0 2y agoVery pretty. Is it still impossible to change the order of the boot list from inside grub?
- BiteCode_dev 2y agoUseful for dual boots, especially for beginners that get nervous when things don't look pretty.
- sombragris 2y agoWhat I'd like would be to have GRUB docs that are understandable enough for regular users and their use cases, rather than just eye candy. For example, right now most users start with a Windows install. What can they do if they want GRUB to handle a dual boot? (BTW, disabling os-prober due to security reasons might be the right call, but it's not helpful at all to newbies wishing to dual boot).
- Jubijub 2y agoI respect the craft, and I have riced my distro, but theming my boot loader is the last thing I would waste time on. I use my motherboard F8 menu to switch between Win11 and Arch boot loaders (so they can ignore each other, much simpler to maintain), so systems-boot appears only exactly 3 seconds to give me an opportunity to boot Linux-LTS instead of the last kernel version. And if I need to do anything fancy at boot time (eg: repair a borked boot config), I use a USB key with arch iso, and chroot into my install and then I have the full power of the command line. I really really fail to see the point of spending hours to theme that.
- bravetraveler 2y agoI only need/want the Beefy Miracle https://major.io/p/bring-back-fedora-beefy-miracle-boot-splash/ https://major.io/p/bring-back-fedora-beefy-miracle-boot-spla... The mustard indicates progress :)