On Arch, I think you could install a second "backup" copy of Arch Linux on a recovery partition that your motherboard firmware can boot into directly, and then use the `arch-chroot` program to recover your main OS. I'm sure something similar exists for other distros?

macOS has both these features, sort of.

Startup chime in SGI machines depended on model. So an Indy had a different one than an Onyx. My first PC (80286) also had iconic sounds when it started up. Never forget.

Micro distro, is recovery OS. All three major desktop OSes have such, or a key combination to activate such. Android has two recovery partitions I believe, redundancy is key.

If you like the power of snapshots, yep filesystems with CoW like ZFS can show a list during boot. An OS like NixOS wouldn't even need such. Works perfectly fine with Ext4FS, including boot menu with snapshots, rollback feature, etc.

I feel like your best bet with this would be one of the kexec-based bootloaders, because then it's a "real" Linux environment there, with whatever tools you want in it, instead of something special.

Eg: https://github.com/kexecboot/kexecboot

I do wish more effort was made to polish all the bits and pieces because all of this exists in some form. I suppose some of it is that everyone is doing their own slightly different thing; NixOS lets you boot to earlier generations, but only by completely turning the filesystem inside out, OpenSUSE can do snapshots, but using BTRFS which means that not many other distros even can use the same implementation, ZFS is the bee's knees but on Linux licensing always adds friction, Ubuntu made boot super smooth via Plymouth but it's very... Ubuntu.

Anyways. If you're in a position to run Linux on ZFS, may I suggest zfsbootmenu?

> ZFSBootMenu leverages the features of modern OpenZFS to allow users to choose among multiple "boot environments" (which may represent different versions of a Linux distribution, earlier snapshots of a common root, or entirely different distributions), manipulate snapshots in a pre-boot environment and, for the adventurous user, even bootstrap a system installation via zfs recv.

- https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/v3.0.x/index.html

Yeah, I usually see it for seconds a year. If I saw it often enough to worry about theming it, I'd rather spend my time on fixing whatever caused me to have to see it so ofen.

I'm pretty sure there is an option for this, holding shift makes it show the menu.

What if you don't remember the key you need to press?

I think you can get that by setting `GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=hidden` and `GRUB_TIMEOUT=0`. Then you can hold `Shift` to see the GRUB menu, otherwise it will boot the default option immediately.

Why would you actually want this? Such a weird desire to hide this kind of stuff because it's so inconsequential in my mind.

Haha, my first thought when I saw the themes was, wow this is exactly like the movie!

Might rewatch it soon, been listening to the soundtrack while working lately :)

judging from some of these repos, I think the answer is: they don't. It seems like you have to manually pick images with the correct resolution

You can set the resolution explicitly, otherwise it will render at resolution UEFI started the boot with.

It's definitely a "you" problem. It works for me over a monitor connected via a docking station. I have tries pop os a while ago but it definitely worked.