14 DAY TRIAL // Many of the Ubuntu long-standing bugs have been fixed, even if some took years, but there is at least one that seems to survive from one iteration to another. We're talking of course about the Ubuntu boot logo.
Ubuntu users who have video cards from NVIDIA or AMD will immediately know what's the problem. As soon as you install the proprietary drivers, the Ubuntu logo that's displayed at boot is shown at very small resolution. It's not an actual problem, and you can even say that it's a first world issue, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still there.
The issue is not present with the Nouveau drivers for NVIDIA and AMD, not to mention that if you have Intel hardware, including video output, the official drivers don't cause this problem.
Anyway, the bug seems to reside with gfxmodem, which is not set properly by update-grub. It can be fixed manually, but that's not the point and not many users will want to go through all the steps, even if they are simple.
The problem is at least Ubuntu 10.04 old
Ubuntu 10.04 was released back in 2010 and our colleague Marius Nestor posted a very handy tutorial back then that proved to be very helpful. What's funny about this situation is that the tutorial still applies, for the most part. The commands for the terminal have remained pretty much the same, but an app that could provide easy access to GRUB settings no longer exists.
In any case, here is the manual solution. Run these commands first:
sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
sudo update-initramfs -u
sudo update-grub2
We are now in 2015, and a new version of Ubuntu has been released, but somehow this problem manages to persist. In any case, I hope that this short tutorial will help some users get some peace of mind after seeing that awful boot logo.