Making GRUB2 theme work with 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"

• Make sure you remove this ❌ GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console" and replace it with ✅ GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm"
• GRUB_GFXMODE="auto" Is to let the system automatically align the resolution.
• GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX="keep" Is to have a fallback system if for any reason the graphical mode does not run.

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.