OS: Fedora Silverblue 39
GPU: NVIDIA with proprietary driver
After an update, plymouth’s default theme has been changed to a text theme called “bgrt”, instead of the gnome style “spinner” theme.
My root is encrypted so /etc/plymouth.conf won’t work for boot.
Is there a way to change the default theme on silverblue? I want to avoid layering packages.
Surely disk are decrypted as part of booting the system. So it will work?
Or did you mean a grub theme and not plymouth?
List available themes with:
plymouth-set-default-theme -l
Set your plymouth theme with:
sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -R "theme-name"
Hello @lunar-rover ,
Welcome to 
!
I think that you may have to make the Silverblue filesystem “live” to do this as it is atomic and the theme choice is part of the image, I think … If, however, you are able to change the Plymouth theme via files in /etc then it should work since this is a mutable area of the file system in Silverblue. And as part of the three-way merge that happens on atomic systems during updates, changes in /etc are kept, so user changes are maintained across updates.
The decryption screen itself uses plymouth. Pressing esc brings me to systemd cli boot screen. Maybe it’s part of that huge 128MiB initramfs in /boot/ostree.
Grub reverted to the stock theme with borders as well, but that’s from me upgrading it manually with rpm -i and I’ll just wait for bootupd to land, hopefully a proper upgrade will fix it automatically.
For silverblue.
sudo plymouth-set-default-theme "theme-name"
rpm-ostree initramfs --enable
FYI, bgrt has been the default theme for Fedora since roughly F30. Was anything else modified (kernel parameters) or drivers updated?
Sadly, It didn’t work. Or do I need to update again after turning it on? It redeployed already.
Strange. I did the original installation at F34 and IIRC that has been the default theme without me doing anything.
I think nvidia driver was updated. Maybe it failed to load somehow?
Sometimes plymouth falls back to the text theme when the video is not yet ready when plymouth starts up. The bgrt is a spinner theme and the text is the one with the four small square blocks.
For example, I upgraded my test system on a qemu virtual machine to f40, and I get the text them about half the time when I reboot, and the bgrt theme the other half of the time.
Good point! So the theme is added to the initrd?
I believe you’re correct. I’m getting the text theme as fallback, and bgrt is what I thought was spinner.
I think so, there’s plymouth.conf in it.
The cause is likely nvidia, plymouth falled back to text during startup.
I tried using the new framebuffer in nvidia-drm but ended up with no avail.