GRUB-Theme collects anime and VTuber boot themes for GRUB

What the repository is

The repository collects GRUB themes drawn from anime and related fandoms, with the description naming the anime The Quintessential Quintuplets, the Fate series, Lycoris Recoil, VTuber, Game Doki Doki Literature Club and the Touhou Project, with the vocabulary that comes with VTuber culture in the tags: hololive, hoshimachi-suisei and kobo-kanaeru.

The scope is deliberately narrow. These are GRUB2 boot menu themes, and the primary language of the repository is Shell, which is what you would expect for scripts that install a theme into a boot configuration. The licence is GPL-3.0.

The structure is one directory per theme family, and the top-level entries confirm it: Doki Doki Literature Club, Fate Series, Lycoris Recoil, The Quintessential Quintuplets, Touhou Project Version, VTuber and Vocaloid, plus .github/, the LICENSE file and the README.

That directory-per-theme layout is what makes the collection usable. GRUB looks for themes in a search path on each filesystem, and a theme is a directory holding the artwork and the configuration that styles the boot menu. Splitting them into separate directories means a user copies the one they want rather than merging a single configuration with every variant in it, and it is also what lets the project tag releases per theme.

The repository is not archived, the default branch is master, and the last push was on 2026-09-15.

The theme families and their variants

The table of contents in the README is effectively the catalogue, and it is more detailed than the repository description.

The Quintessential Quintuplets has an Original Version and a Christmas Version. The Quintessential Quintuplets preview images are labelled per character, with separate entries for Nakano Ichika, Nakano Nino, Nakano Miku, Nakano Yotsuba and Nakano Itsuki, which are the five sisters. A Christmas variant alongside the original is the kind of addition that only makes sense for a seasonal theme pack.

The Fate series version has the most variants of any family, one per character: Artoria Pendragon, Illyasviel von Einzbern, Tohsaka Rin, Matou Sakura, Leonardo da Vinci, Mash Kyrielight and Okita Souji.

Then there is one version each for Lycoris Recoil, for Doki Doki Literature Club, for the Touhou Project and for Vocaloid, plus a VTuber version, and a separate Fate series section in the contents listing.

The previews are hosted on DeviantArt under the account 13andi01, linked from the README, and each preview link points at a specific art piece. So the artwork originates outside the repository and the repository carries the GRUB packaging of it, which is worth knowing before you install anything.

The VTuber theme gets its own mention in the release history, where the tag VTuber-v1.2 is annotated VTuber Airani Iofifteen, which tells you the VTuber theme has been revised around a specific character since the first version.

The presence of an explicit copyright and thanks note section in the contents, along with a note that the author asks for support, tells you the author is aware that fan artwork raises questions and has thought about how to handle it.

One release tag per theme

The release history is the most informative part of the repository for anyone deciding which version to install.

There are three tags and they are named after the theme rather than after a version of the software. Lyco-v1.0 for Lycoris Recoil from 2024-04-04, VTuber-v1.2 for VTuber Airani Iofifteen from 2024-01-21, and Vocaloid-v1.0 for Vocaloid from 2023-09-28.

So the versioning scheme is per-theme, with an independent counter for each family, and only the families that have been revised get tags at all. The ones with no tag are presumably installed straight from the master branch directory.

That scheme has a practical consequence for installation and for anyone writing a script against these themes. If you pin, you pin to a tag that exists for three of the eight families, and the version number tells you nothing about the rest. If you want reproducible installs across the whole collection, the master branch is the only consistent reference point, which means you are tracking the branch rather than a release.

The dates also give a sense of the project's cadence. The most recent tag is from April 2024, and the last push is from September 2026, so the repository is being touched well after the last release tag. For a collection of artwork rather than a program, that is not unusual: new artwork and new character variants get committed to the branch, and a tag is cut when a particular theme is considered stable enough to point an installer at.

The topics list reinforces that the repository is a distribution point for community artwork rather than a piece of software with its own release engineering.

Installing a theme, and what to check first

The README lists three installation methods, and the contents section links to them as First installation way, Second installation way and Third installation way. The body text of those sections is collapsed behind anchors in the file, so the repository points at three routes rather than describing a single one in the visible text.

That structure is the sensible one for a theme collection. There is a difference between installing from a downloaded archive, installing from a cloned repository, and installing through a package manager or a helper script, and a collection like this generally offers all three. The three anchors in the table of contents are what tell you that the author thought about the range of cases rather than assuming one.

What you should check before installing any of them is the GRUB2 version in use. The topics name grub, grub2, grub-configuration, grub-themes and grub-boot-menu, and GRUB2 replaced the legacy GRUB in most current distributions, so a theme built for GRUB2 will not work on the old one and the configuration paths differ between them as well.

The other thing to check is where your current bootloader configuration lives, because installing a theme means copying files into the boot partition and pointing the GRUB configuration at them. Keeping a copy of the existing configuration is the difference between a theme change and a machine that does not boot, and that is true of any GRUB theming work rather than something specific to this collection.

The Shell primary language and the presence of a .github/ directory suggest that at least part of the installation is scripted, which is convenient but also means the script will write to paths outside your home directory and will need the privileges to do so. Read the script before running it.

Where GRUB-Theme fits, and where it stops

The comparison worth making is with the themes that ship with a distribution and with a general purpose theme system.

Against a distribution theme, the difference is purely aesthetic and that is not a criticism. The default GRUB background on most distributions is a plain dark screen with a white menu, and installing one of these replaces it with a piece of artwork. For someone whose machine boots several times a day, that is the entire appeal, and the collection is thorough about the characters it covers.

Against a general purpose theme system, the difference is that this is a set of fixed artefacts rather than a mechanism. There are no options for font sizes, no colour schemes, no layouts, no way to ask for a different boot menu position or a different resolution handling. What you get is what the author made.

The limits are worth naming. The artwork is hosted on DeviantArt while the GRUB packaging lives in the repository, so the two are versioned separately and a theme can change under you if the source art is edited. The themes are static: they change the background and the menu styling, not the boot entries, the timeout or the recovery options. There is no script for generating a theme from your own artwork, so making a personal one means copying a directory and swapping the image, which the directory-per-theme layout makes straightforward. And the project is a single contributor's hobby project with release tags from 2024 and a repository that is still being pushed to, so the long-term maintenance of any individual theme is a matter of trust rather than a schedule.

There is also the question the project itself acknowledges with its copyright and thanks section. These are fan works built on characters and series owned by other people, and the GPL-3.0 licence covers the packaging rather than the artwork. For personal use that is not a practical obstacle, and for redistribution it is a question worth thinking about before you package one of these into an image you distribute.

What the repository does well is coverage and packaging. Eight families, individual character variants for the two largest ones, per-theme release tags, previews linked from DeviantArt so you can see the result before touching your bootloader, and a directory layout that lets you take one theme and leave the rest.

Editorial conclusion

GRUB-Theme suits a Linux user who wants their boot menu to look like a specific character or series, since each theme is packaged as its own directory with its own release tag, so you can install one without pulling in the rest of the collection. It is the wrong tool if you want a configurable bootloader, because these are fixed artwork rather than a theme system with options, and it is the wrong tool if you need anything beyond a static background, since nothing here changes the boot entries or the timeout. Before you install one, check which GRUB2 version your distribution ships and keep a copy of the current configuration, because replacing the bootloader theme is the kind of change that leaves a machine unbootable if the paths are wrong.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. 13atm01/GRUB-Theme on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: GPL-3.0
4. README
5. Releases