Plymouth

Plymouth is used to show splash screens during boot and shut-down. It is a more modern alternative to fbsplash and provides flicker-free animated boot splashes with a progress bar. It also has full systemd support. However, it does not provide eye-candy for the ttys in the way fbsplash does (meaning it shows no decoration on your consoles while the system is running).

Installation
can be installed using

It will install a number of themes automatically.

However, genkernel cannot create an initramfs with a plymouth theme included. Therefore either dracut or is needed. We will here continue with genkernel-next as it is marked stable. The plymouth use flag needs to be enabled.

Configuration
The first step is to select a Plymouth theme. A list of all themes can be found using

Assuming we want to select the solar theme

Additionally we need to enable this theme in the initramfs generation:

Note that SPLASH should stay no because this parameter refers to fbsplash.

As a last step you need to recreate the initramfs and then the splash screen should work on the next system boot:

Plymouth automatically registers itself with systemd to show a splash screen during shutdown/restart.