[Design-team] Fedora GRUB2 boot menu, from design perspective

[Máirín Duffy]

On 2012-06-20 03:40, Dan Mashal wrote:>
> "Oh btw in Fedora 18 you have to go to advanced boot options to boot
> an older kernel now. Yeah I know, we've been able to do this for 20
> years now since the dawn of time but they think it's better for 
> novice
> users this way."

And one day I realized I am getting older. I can't pull all-nighters 
anymore and hack on code. My parents don't take care of me anymore, I 
have to make my own living, cook my own meals, and take care of my own 
living space. I can't have as much Hello Kitty stuff without people 
thinking I'm a little bit weird. I can't ride on some of the rides at 
Disney World anymore because I'm too big.

Life is change. Change is progress. It may be progress towards old age 
and an eventual death, sure, but the alternative - stasis - seems to me 
to be a hellish and completely undesirable alternative. How many movies 
and novels and other storylines have taken on the theme of a protoganist 
who never dies or is ageless (Twilight, haha) and whose life is 
miserable because they can never die, age, or change?

Change is the only way we can progress forward and innovate and make 
life better. By the same logic, 'we've been able to do this for 20 years 
now,' we would never have the television because we already had the 
radio. We would never have HD TV because we would have already had NTSC.

> Just 1 example of many things. You can't expect Fedora to be a distro
> that you can really settle and get "used to" when it's constantly
> changing.

All distros are constantly changing. Compare any distro's current 
version to its version 4 releases ago. The entire Linux architecture is 
changing (for the better, I'd add), and Fedora is an upstream-loyal 
distro. If something is changed in how the kernel works, we are not 
going to fork it just to prevent change.

> I know this is the whole point of the whole distro, to be "bleeding
> edge" and have the latest technologies in our awesome distro.

The point of our distro is not to be bleeding edge. We are not 
interested in anyone bleeding or getting cut. We are interested in 
making the latest all of our awesome upstreams are producing available 
to a wider audience.
>
> In my daily life I'm a sysadmin. Figuring out how to do something on
> RHEL 5 vs RHEL 6 vs CentOS 5 vs CentOS 6 vs Fedora 13 Fedora 14 
> Fedora
> 15 Fedora 16 Fedora 17 Fedora 18 and what's different between each 
> and
> every single one is annoying in every day life at work.

If you are a sysadmin, I can understand your attitude because if you 
are good at what you do (and i'm sure you are) you highly prioritize 
managing change and minimizing it as much as possible so systems don't 
break and unexpected problems don't crop up so you get called up at 2 AM 
to fix someting. Fedora is not meant for system administrators though. 
Fedora is a desktop distribution and is not intended to be a server OS, 
most certainly not as its primary or even secondary goal.

If your preference is a distro that minimizes change, might I suggest 
CentOS, Goose Linux, or Scientific Linux?
>
> "Oh yeah so dude on Fedora 17 they moved to systemd. That service
> command doesn't work the same way and neither does chkconfig either
> anymore. Sorry bro deal with it."

Fedora is not the only distro that adopted systemd. That is a Linux OS 
architecture change much wider and further upstream than Fedora is.

~m