X really can't start that early. It depends on too many other pieces being started first. But in Fedora we do have early access to the framebuffer. Plymouth us

X really can't start that early. It depends on too many other pieces being started first. But in Fedora we do have early access to the framebuffer. Plymouth uses that to display the animated Fedora logo and to prompt for any encryption passphrases. The hardware needs to support it though, so you may not see this, especially when running in a virtual environment. When it works right it looks pretty nice, you get a mostly seamless graphic screen after grub2 until gdm. And you can always hit ESC to see the scrolling systemd startup messages.