GRUB — Matrix/Cyberpunk Theme

A boot menu I redesigned, with one detail I care about more than the rest: you can see it before you install it.

What it is

The screen every Linux user sees for a second and a half on every boot, which almost nobody designs and everybody notices. A dark, terminal-typographic menu with a frosted glass panel, a glowing cyan timeout bar, and an animated binary-rain background — a cyberpunk take on the Iranian flag.

The part worth mentioning is preview.png. Modifying GRUB means modifying your bootloader, which means rebooting to find out whether you liked it. This theme renders a mock-up of the result as an image, so the design can be reviewed like any other design.

What it does

• A frosted, semi-transparent menu panel that scales cleanly to any screen, rather than being a fixed-size image that stretches badly.
• A glowing timeout bar — the one element users actually look at, since it tells them how long they have.
• Fifteen hand-drawn 32×32 OS icons for the boot entries, instead of the same default for everything.
• An animated binary-rain background, generated with ImageMagick, that keeps animating in a bootloader menu, where nothing is supposed to animate.
• A preview image of the finished result, before installation.
• An installer that can be run twice and will not break anything the second time, with automatic backup, and an uninstaller that puts things back the way they were.

The numbers

15	hand-drawn OS icons
3	colour palettes — cyan, Matrix green, amber
1	idempotent installer, with a matching uninstaller

Why it’s worth a look

This is a small, cosmetic project, and I am including it because the constraints are interesting rather than the result. GRUB’s theme engine is barely documented, its images have a specific format that many tools cannot read, and everything you do to it is one boot away from an unbootable machine. Writing an installer you can run twice, which backs up before it changes anything, and which can be cleanly undone, is more care than the aesthetic result justifies — and that is the point.

The preview image is the same instinct. The dangerous part of this project is not the design, it is the installation, so I made the design reviewable without taking the risk.