I installed Ubuntu GNOME 14.04.4 amd64, and this also gets "splash" on the kernel command line by default. Are you sure that you didn't manually remove this?
I dist-upgraded this to 16.04 then; this was a bit bumpy (took some apt-get -f installs, but this is unrelated). After that I still had "splash" in the command line, and during boot I see the gray/white double u logo with the blue spinner, which should be the plymouth splash.
So I'm afraid I either cannot reproduce this or I misunderstand what the issue is here.
I installed Ubuntu GNOME 14.04.4 amd64, and this also gets "splash" on the kernel command line by default. Are you sure that you didn't manually remove this?
I dist-upgraded this to 16.04 then; this was a bit bumpy (took some apt-get -f installs, but this is unrelated). After that I still had "splash" in the command line, and during boot I see the gray/white double u logo with the blue spinner, which should be the plymouth splash.
So I'm afraid I either cannot reproduce this or I misunderstand what the issue is here.