How to uninstall plymouth?

Question

hepita@Hepitowo:~$ sudo apt-get purge plymouth
Following packages will be REMOVED:
lightdm* mountall* plymouth* plymouth-label* plymouth-theme-ubuntu-logo*
plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text* ubuntu-desktop* unity* unity-greeter*
unity-tweak-tool* upstart*

Any possible way to remove Plymouth in Ubuntu 16.04? After installing nvidia drivers it is displaying at wrong resolution (and starts long time after boot, a few seconds before display manager) and I decided to remove it. Why Plymouth is so important for package manager?

Solution

Plymouth is well-integrated into Ubuntu, and removing it could get difficult. Fortunately, you don't need to remove plymouth in order to disable it; there's a GRUB boot option called splash that can toggle the graphical boot screen on or off.

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To disable graphical boot in Ubuntu, you need to open your /etc/default/grub file for editing, with superuser privileges. Under regular Ubuntu, this can be accomplished with:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

(on a command-line-only system or any other Ubuntu variant, open a terminal and type sudo nano /etc/default/grub instead.)

Locate the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in /etc/default/grub , it might look like:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Then remove the splash from this line, so it looks like the following:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet"

Save the file and exit the editor.

Finally, to apply your changes, open a terminal and run:

sudo update-grub

Now your system should boot in text mode, without the graphical boot screen.

Comments

[Richard Gomes]

I've installed Ubuntu server hoping that all graphical stuff were out, removed, cured, erradicated. No. Ubuntu is oppinionated and throws this crazy plymouth which only serves for making people mad. Sysadmins are old fashined, actually...not fashioned at all... and do not care about a fancy beautiful (but annoying) graphical stuff which only consumes time to be removed/disabled and make us mad. Canonical, please... .do the right thing and remove this annoying graphical stuff from Ubunt server. Needless to say that I do not have any *buntu at home.

[David Ljung Madison Stellar]

Worth a read, @RichardGomes - web.dodds.net/~vorlon/wiki/blog/Plymouth_is_not_a_bootsplash

[Richard Gomes]

@DavidLjungMadisonStellar: Thanks a lot for educating me on the matter. I only use Debian on all my boxes since 2004, when I got mad with Ubuntu, with two serious regressions in a week. Down the road in 2018, supporting a customer in love with Ubuntu, things didn't look any better. But there's hope: more and more companies are adopting Debian: rock solid stable, reliable and predictable. Once again, thanks a lot for your help. Kind Regards.

[David Ljung Madison Stellar]

Understood - but it's good to be upset with Ubuntu about the things that it may be doing wrong, and not angry about things that it might be doing right. :)