Yeah, like, seems odd to boot hang here. Why doesn't it just say "nope" to whatever it's being asked to do (KMS or something i assume, i have no idea) and move on.

I have a new Intel NUC whose Iris graphics is apparently little too new for ubuntu's drivers/firmware (works fine on fedora beta and if i and install newer custom-build kernels on ubuntu). It hangs completely on startup without giving me any info.

That's actually one of the worst parts of these stupid splash-screened distros. Because they don't bother to help you at all, you have to go through some other mechanism (rescue mode), and understand how to debug the original problem.

it's all astonishingly user-hostile.

It's been forever since I daily drove Linux sadly... is it possible to disable those splash screens and put the old TTY boot sequence stuff back? That was always super handy debugging whatever thing I'd recently broken at boot. And I personally think it looks way cooler :)

Removing the quiet and splash parameters from the kernel boot parameters in grub will usually do the job of generating normal verbose output.

In most I've encountered, PgDn switches to showing you the system boot log

Of course it is possible; check your kernel parameters and remove "quiet splash" to disable it permanently. For one-time, just press Esc.

Can disable them in UEFI.

I was an early X570/Zen 2 and RDNA adopter. CPU/MB wete mostly fine but I couldn't get proper Vulkan support for an year until I pulled the trigger on a rolling distro for that particular build

It's not the bootsplash that causes the "hang", it's the AMDGPU driver kicking in. With firmware issues or amdgpu bugs in the past, my tty goes away when the module is inserted. The driver goes in, the system tries to switch to an accelerated framebuffer, the GPU driver has a problem, and you're left just looking at a black screen.

Bootsplash just does this earlier in the process by inserting the module and throwing up some DRM/GBM app while in initramfs.

The system was still up, I ssh'd in and looked at the logs.

You are usually able to hit escape and look at dmesg instead of the splash.

Not once it's hung. They also turn on quiet mode, so it won't display most kernel messages anyway.