Should show information about boot (i.e. text).

[Matt Sicker]

Let's say for example the boot process has an error; how the hell are you supposed to know what happened if the damn splash screen isn't telling you anything about what's going on? What if the boot hangs? How do you determine what parts of the boot are taking too much time?

Just because Windows screws the user over with a cryptic loading bar with no information about what's going on doesn't mean Ubuntu should be taking the same route which makes it nearly impossible for normal users to find out what might be wrong.

The old method from Dapper works fine in this case; it tells you minimal information about what's going on, and if something goes wrong, it goes to the full kernel message screen.

And if you want to say that Mac OS X does this too, think again. The OS X boot is split into like 8 different steps, and each step can be identified by an audio or visual cue.

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

You can obtain text output by removing the "quiet" option from the kernel command line. In the case of a failure, the graphical boot screen will automatically exit.