Gorgeous-GRUB: collection of decent community-made GRUB themes
38 comments
·May 3, 2025marcodiego
yjftsjthsd-h
I 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.
mikepurvis
I 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.
dharmab
On 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?
Fnoord
macOS 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.
userbinator
I'm a huge proponent of customisation, but for me, the less I have to see or even think about GRUB, the better.
vidarh
Yeah, 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
You'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
Meanwhile, 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
Ah. You don't ever patch, I guess.
bigstrat2003
Or he is managing headless systems where you don't see the boot process unless something has gone wrong.
imcritic
How do those background images scale on different monitors/resolutions?
Btw, how does grub figure out in what resolution to draw the interface?
mshockwave
judging 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
You can set the resolution explicitly, otherwise it will render at resolution UEFI started the boot with.
cosmic_cheese
This 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?
rsaxvc
My pet peeve is that grub repartitions windows disks on chain load, so if it ever boots with the disks remapped, there's a chance it'll plow apart the partition table of whatever poor disk got mapped to that hd#.
shmerl
May 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.
Grosvenor
I can finally make my computer look like the ones from hackers! Awesome.
nico
Haha, 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
A soundtrack so good they made three separate soundtracks. The last one was entirely music that wasn’t in the movie.
Fantastic.
WD-42
Stuff 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!
PebblesHD
While 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.
kej
I 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
Good 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
voidfunc
Why would you actually want this? Such a weird desire to hide this kind of stuff because it's so inconsequential in my mind.
Fnoord
Because sane OSes have sane defaults, and this is one of them. Hide information by default, unless called for. Want verbose boot log? Ask for it. Want boot menu? Ask for it. Need Bluetooth enabled at boot? Aak for it. Don't overburden the user with irrelevant info. When my 7 y.o. daughter fires up the Steam Decj, she doesn't need to see the boot menu.
null
treyd
I'm pretty sure there is an option for this, holding shift makes it show the menu.
noisy_boy
I'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
It'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.
arp242
"Grand Theft Gentoo": https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Jacksaur/Gorgeous-GRUB/ref...
jwitthuhn
Love the concept of BSOL, might give that a try.
What 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.