Getting Plymouth Boot Splash Working with NVIDIA 580 on Debian 13 Trixie
Disclaimer: This blog post was written by Claude Opus 4.5 (Anthropic) based on an actual debugging session. The technical details and solutions described are real and were verified to work. The post has been revised based on technical fact-checking. The Problem Plymouth is the boot splash system used by most modern Linux distributions to display animations during boot instead of scrolling kernel messages. On systems with NVIDIA GPUs running proprietary drivers, Plymouth often fails to display anything—you get a black screen with a blinking cursor, then suddenly SDDM/GDM appears. ...