How to Completely Disable the ‘Plymouth’ Boot Splash Screen (Show Text Output) in Ubuntu

When you boot up a modern Ubuntu desktop or server, the operating system hides the complex Linux boot sequence behind a graphical splash screen showing the Ubuntu logo and a spinning loading wheel. This graphical overlay is handled by a piece of software called “Plymouth.”

While this makes the boot process look clean and consumer-friendly, it completely blinds you to what the operating system is actually doing. If your server is hanging during boot because a network drive failed to mount, or a specific systemd service is crashing, Plymouth will simply spin forever, offering zero diagnostic information. For system administrators, developers, and power users who need to see the raw kernel output to diagnose boot issues, you must completely disable the Plymouth splash screen and force Ubuntu into verbose text mode.

Disabling Plymouth via the GRUB Bootloader

To turn off the graphical splash screen, you must edit the default boot parameters inside the GRUB bootloader configuration file.

1. Open a Terminal session (or connect to your server via SSH).
2. Open the GRUB configuration file using a text editor with root privileges:
   sudo nano /etc/default/grub
3. Look down the file for the line that begins with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. By default, it usually looks like this:
   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
4. You must delete the words quiet and splash from inside the quotation marks. The splash command tells the kernel to launch Plymouth, and the quiet command tells it to suppress text output.
5. The line should now look like this (leave the quotation marks empty, or leave any other custom arguments you might have added previously):
   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
6. Save the file (Ctrl + O, then Enter) and exit the editor (Ctrl + X).

Updating GRUB and Rebooting

Editing the text file does not change the bootloader itself. You must instruct Ubuntu to rebuild the boot configuration using the new parameters.

1. In the terminal, run the following command:
   sudo update-grub
2. You will see terminal output as the system generates a new grub.cfg file.
3. Once it completes, restart your machine to test the changes:
   sudo reboot

The next time your computer turns on, the Ubuntu logo will be completely gone. Instead, you will see a rapid cascade of white text scrolling down a black screen as every single kernel module, driver, and background service initializes in real-time, giving you total visibility into your boot sequence.