So, I have the following issue: I have a late 2008 Aluminum Macbook with dual boot: MacOS High Sierra and EndeavourOS. I use rEFInd as my boot manager, which is installed on the MacOS partition, as it is my safe OS that I can always come back to in case something breaks in EOS. MacOS boots fine: I select it from the rEFINd menu, and then I see the apple logo with a white background, and a few seconds later the background switches to dark due to my system settings. Then I see the login screen. So a clean boot process with good visuals. EOS boots fine as well, but it’s not so visually clean. I went for the clean boot on it, i.e. disabling all the boot and shutdown messages with the “quiet” and “loglevel=3” parameters as well as a parameter responsible for disabling the pointer blink, don’t remember it exactly. I also disabled the rEFINd splash screen by adjusting the respective refind.conf file. The idea was that I would get a similar visually appealing boot process as the one I have with MacOS. Now, these parameters all do their job, but the issue I have with booting specifically into EOS/Arch Linux is that when I select it from the rEFINd boot menu, I also see a blank white screen for a few seconds, which is kind of fine, but then, right before the system boots into the login screen and before the laptop shuts down, the white screen is kind of shredded with horizontal grey lines, as if my gpu is tweaking or something like that. I’m not sure what is causing it and how to tackle this. I mean, these greyish stripes don’t impact the system performance or anything like that, but it just looks bad and ugly, so I’d like to amend that, if possible.
I’ve tried to solve this with ChatGBT, and it understood my problem and actually provided me with lots of solutions, like:
- video=efifb:off to disable the EFI framebuffer - no visual effect at all
- nouveau.modeset=1 - no visual effect at all
- confirmed that the nouveaudrmfb is active
- created dracut config to load nouveau early and omit simplefb and efifb - tearing started earlier, lasted longer, but this showed that nouveau was initializing earlier as well
- added early DRM setup via dracut - no improvements at all
- installed and configured Plymouth properly with dracut - cleaner boot middle phase, but the screen tearing is still visible for a short while before and after plymouth
According to ChatGBP, nothing else can be done to amend the situation and this is as visually appealing a boot I can achieve as possible with this device, but I would like to ask you guys here and see what you think about this? Perhaps there is something that is missing or something that could be tried?
I know it is a very minor and insignificant point, but I am striving so hard for a nice clean boot experience that I want to try EVERYTHING.
Thanks!
Maybe try to do some searching by your own starting here
With all due respect, I would not write here before I’d exhausted all the options I could come across
Well I am sorry but the only thing you mentioned was ChatGBT, so … 
Well, sadly the EOS installation on my retired Macbook Pro 7,1 (late 2010) is currently broken, better said I’ve misconfigured SWAY in some way and it fails to start into the graphical environment.
Just booted the machine up and tried to see which kind of visual glitch you may referring to. But on my install (only EOS, no dual boot) I can’t see anything that you’re describing. And I also can’t recall anything similar at the stage when I was using rEFInd on that machine as well.
In short: if it’s only a artifact occurring during the boot process for a brief duration… why bother ?
Have you checked if that glitch is also present when booting from a live iso ?
Hey,
Thanks for the reply.
Nice to hear that you also have a similarly old machine that is still going, if not straight 
.
I mean, if I eventually can’t figure this out, I’ll forger this, of course, for as I’ve said it doesn’t affect the system itself in any way, it’s the visual aspect of it only what is annoying me.
Speaking about the live iso question, no, I haven’t checked it - didn’t come up with this idea. But I’m wondering whether I’ll be able to achieve the same boot process, as when you boot from live iso, you always see the boot messages starting with [OK] where it shows that all the system modules are loaded etc. And when I see the boot messages, the glitch is absent - it was also absent when I had these boot messages on my current system, but as soon as I hid them with the kernel parameters to make a clean boot, the glitch appeared. If
I’ll also try to capture what I see during the boot process so that you have a better idea of what I’m referring to, although I’m not sure whether I can post videos here.
Thanks 
Have you tried setting graphics on in your rEFInd boot stanza?
https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/configfile.html
| Token |
Possible Parameters |
Explanation |
| Graphics |
On or Off |
Enables or disables a graphical boot mode. This option has an effect only on Macintoshes; UEFI PCs seem to be unaffected by it. |
Yes, this option is set. But I don’t think it’s related to rEFInd. Maybe it’s because my gpu is too old (Nvidia 9400m) and the nouveau driver that supports it cannot properly initiate graphics or something? But I’m just wild guessing.
Anyways, please see see a link to the video of how my boot process looks: the shredding that I’m referring to happens after I choose the kernel in rEFInd and is characterized by grey stripes on the white background both before and after the plymouth screen (it’s also present without plymouth, so it’s not plymouth related - I was actually trying to hide it with plymouth).