I have a VM installed with Ubuntu MATE 24.10 and for the last 2 fresh installs, Plymouth has been messed up. It's weird as it happened with 24.04 and now 24.10. Any help would be appreciated. The shutdown splash screen is just fine. I tried several things yet the start up splash screen looks like below:
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Today, sudo apt update/upgrade had an update for Plymouth but that did not fix the issue. I have found Plymouth to be somewhat unreliable over the years, and usually I have had to do a complete fresh install to fix this issue. But this time, 2 fresh installs and it is still broken.
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I can't provide any solution or additional detail, but you may feel better in that you're not alone. I'm talking here about live and installs on actual hardware as I rarely use VMs.
I have some boxes I use in QA that seem to regularly show the text plymouth screens on boot, but when booted occasionally with some dailies I get to see graphic plymouth screens; then next daily and its back to textual plymouth.
For me too it's been ~years, in fact I may have an old bug report which I tagged in hopes some pattern would appear, but that release will be EOL & thus bug reported closed. Whilst I probably reported mostly using Lubuntu ISOs, as there were usually no Lubuntu changes between dailies when it occurred & didn't occur, it's likely impacting all flavors which I believe I confirmed (Xubuntu, Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu MATE..)
I tend to see it on older hardware though, and only a few (small % of my ~25 devices used in QA) so I've not really worried. On my own installs I tend to disable plymouth anyway (I may not watch the boot messages regularly; but I'd hope I may notice unusual changes should they occur this way)
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Thanks for your input. Would this be considered a bug? I will report it as such I think
turns out I reported as a bug for 22.04 LTS. I just added a screenshot and it's still open, so fingers crossed, but it will likely go unanswered
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Stupid question: Did you attempt a forced re-install of the Plymouth package?
and after that, reinstall LightDM ?
hmmmm. no. Is it hard to do?
I use Synaptic as my package manager and right-click for the "reinstall" choice for each package. If you check off both at the same time, the system will figure out the necessary precedence as to which should be done first.
Otherwise, for lightdm, you can use the line command
dpkg -S $(realpath $(which lightdm) )
which will report the package name (field left of ":")
lightdm: /usr/sbin/lightdm
... and again, for plymouth ...
dpkg -S $(realpath $(which plymouth) )
which will report
plymouth: /usr/bin/plymouth
then reinstall both using
sudo apt-get install --reinstall plymouth lightdm
Single-line apt-get commands should have the smarts to install in the necessary logical sequence. I happen to know that lightdm "manages" the use of "plymouth", so I placed them in what I believe is the necessary precedence list for install, but I truly believe that it would figure it out on its own if necessary.
There is this other discussion where the "infrequent" occurence of no package reported using the "dpkg" search function does occur. That is all I am going to say here about that. 
That's not a plymouth issue. There is no driver to display graphics at that stage, and plymouth goes into fallback text mode.
@tkn has already given you a hint:
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fixed, thanks tkn and irinfoot
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