GRUB2 graphical theme on Fedora KDE Plasma 44

I spent a bit too long staring at a Fedora GRUB theme that looked correct and still refused to show up. Classic. Previously, I did this for Linux Mint, but that was slightly easier, even with UEFI and Secure Boot.

The theme files were there, the config looked fine, and I had already done the usual bit of downloading the Fedora theme from the preview page and copying it into place. The thing I missed was annoyingly small.

What I had already done

I grabbed the Fedora theme from:

https://k1ng.dev/distro-grub-themes/preview

Then I copied the fedora folder to:

/boot/grub2/themes/fedora/

After that I edited:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

and added:

GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/fedora/theme.txt"

Then I rebuilt the GRUB config:

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

None of that was the real problem.

The bit that was missing

I had left GRUB in console mode.

That was the whole thing.

The line I missed was:

GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm"

That was the critical part. I had the theme path right, but GRUB was still acting like a plain text console, so the graphical theme never had a chance to render.

The actual fix was to switch it so GRUB could use graphical terminal output instead.

The fix

In /etc/default/grub, make sure the relevant bits look like this:

GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm"
GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/fedora/theme.txt"

Then rebuild the config again:

sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

After that, reboot.

What happened after that

It worked.

Here is the sample output, i could not take a proper screenshot as it is a boot menu. So the above is from the preview wiki.

The theme came up, the fonts worked, and the whole GRUB → gfxterm → theme path finally behaved like it was supposed to.

The wallpaper looked a little stretched on my ultrawide display, which is fine. That was expected enough to not bother me.

The fonts were also a bit smaller than I really wanted. Probably two or three points bigger would be nicer. But for now it is readable, so I left it alone instead of turning a working setup into another round of fiddling.

Here is the code for my current GRUB2 config file.

/etc/default/grub

GRUB_TIMEOUT=5  
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)"  
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved  
GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true  
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm"  
GRUB_GFXMODE="auto"  
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX="keep"  
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rhgb quiet rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core modprobe.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core"  
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"  
GRUB_ENABLE_BLSCFG=true  
GRUB_THEME="/boot/grub2/themes/fedora/theme.txt"

Quick version

If the GRUB theme keeps falling back to plain text on Fedora KDE Plasma, check this first:

GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm"

I had the theme path right. I had rebuilt GRUB. I had the files in place.

The missing terminal line was the actual blocker.

Very annoying. Also very fixable.