I’m not sure when this started, but 70%-90% of the time, I see no messages or even a splash screen on boot. I get a black screen with 2 messages regarding a usb external hard drive that tells me it has no cache and then nothing until I see a terminal screen with login prompt and a message that the locale service is starting followed by the KDE start-up splash screen. The computer seems to work normally from then on. I have found a boot.log file in var/log containing the messages, so they are being generated. Oddly enough, from time to time I go through a patch where the messages appear normally after the black screen with the 2 messages, and then after a few boots, the problem recurs. I’m at a loss as to why this is happening or how to fix it. I’d love some ideas.
I am running Tumbleweed on my machine and since a few month I also don’t have the splash screen when openSUSE is booting. Because I wasn’t able to fix it, I decided to add the following kernel parameters:
splash=silent plymouth.enable=0 loglevel=3
These parameters disable the splash screen completely and when it’s booting you will see the startup messages instead.
This is not a fix, but I was a bit annoyed that the splash screen and the password prompt for my encrypted hard drives aren’t shown anymore so I decided to deactivate the splash completely.
I think it’s a bug. When that happens, try CTRL-ALT-F7. In my experience, that shows the normal spash screen.
In my case, I’m using disk encryption, so I expect a prompt for encryption key. When the splash screen doesn’t show, I have to use CTRL-ALT-F7 to find where to enter that encryption key.
However, what I am mostly doing now, is I remove the “splash=silent” from the grub boot command. And after that, I see a running list of boot messages. And I do get the encryption prompt in text mode.