I have to admit this is a little cryptic. I’ve got no idea what you’re trying to tell me.
I’ve searched the forum prior to asking the question. I’ve read about a bunch of plymouth issues. Mainly edge cases (optimus-manager) or NVIDIA related stuff. Then there are complaints about the forced ‘kms’ hook installation to make plymouth work|avoid the black bootscreen problem. Nothing specific to the ‘plymouth’ hook other than tutorials for uninstalling plymouth altogether.
I also found the .pacnew post by @linub. That’s why I knew about the ‘microcode’ hook.
If I merge the .pacnew now, it would effectively remove the ‘plymouth’ hook and I just wonder if it is considered best practice to remove it. That’s at least what I get from the .pacnew file. Why would the Manjaro team go the extra mile of forcefully installing the ‘kms’ hook to make ‘plymouth’ work but not include the ‘plymouth’ hook in the .pacnew file?
EDIT (28.05.24)
I was really having a battle with myself on what to do and also had to pluck up some courage to tinker with mkinitcpio.conf and grub.cfg. I always expect this going horribly wrong and me ending up with an unbootable system.
Nevertheless I finally did it yesterday. I merged the .pacnew, removed the plymouth hook, rebuild the initramfs, removed “quiet” and “splash” from /etc/default/grub and rebuilt the grub.cfg. I even removed the plymouth package and theme from the system.
I come from years of using Ubuntu since 6.10 (Edgy Eft) which worked out of the box, so I never felt the need to dive deeper into Linux/the depths of the OS. Since I’ve changed to a rolling release distribution with Manjaro, I’ve read and learnt a lot out of sheer necessity. The last year has really been an adventure. 