One of the often overlooked pieces of the Linux desktop software stack is Plymouth that for the past 15 years or so has been providing a graphical boot splash screen that succeeded Red Hat's former RHGB software or having no graphical boot splash screen at all on some Linux distributions. This week marked the first new release of Plymouth in nearly two years.

Plymouth helps to beautify the Linux boot process and also makes it convenient for entering passwords on full disk encryption setups and was great at its inception for targeting DRM/KMS drivers. Plymouth 23.51.283 is the new release that is the first official release for this open-source project since January 2022.

Ray Strode at Red Hat released Plymouth 23.51.283 that includes improved DRM driver integration, a label-freetype plug-in that is a new solution for text rendering with a reduced disk footprint for the initramfs, support for using /dev/input devices, Meson build system integration, integrated console support to work with kernels that don't have FBCON, rich text support for labels, localization improvements, and a new splash mode for indicating a factory reset is in process. Overall it's a rather big and useful update for this often overlooked area of providing a polished Linux desktop experience.

More details on this new Plymouth release via FreeDesktop.org's GitLab .