Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Ryan Lerch]

On 03/11/2013 12:58 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would love to see F19 make a good first impression. The first time you see something Fedora-related on the screen currently is the graphical grub screen, followed by the filling-in-Fedora of Plymouth, followed by the gdm login screen. Grub in particular is problematic, with a starfield background that looks like a Fedora background from a few releases ago and a progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the bootloader'.
>
> There are also some issues on the login screen, with Fedora logo being at small-print size right now.
>
> I think a few simple changes we can make a big improvement to the visual experience for F19:
>
> - Turn off the graphical grub screen
>
> Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu like this: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-login-boot/bootmenu.png, avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
IIRC, in f17, the GRUB screen was not visible. (you could still press 
f11 to bring it up if you needed it to). Does anyone know why this 
behaviour changed?
>
> - Switch to a simple spinner for the plymouth theme
>
> This theme is available in plymouth today: https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock-login-boot/boot.png
> I know when we've proposed this in the past, there was concern about loosing the one place where the Fedora logo is visible in the boot. I'd like to propose a compromise that will keep the Fedora logo _and_ improve the transition to the login screen: How about we use the spinner as in that mockup, but add a reasonably-sized Fedora logo in the top left corner.

The current logo also currently behaves as a progress bar (the logo 
fills up). I know that currently it really doesn't match to any kind of 
progress, but is the idea here that there will be no progress indicator, 
just a spinner?

Also, is there an intention here to explain to the user (e.g. text or 
icons) what is happening? In F18, the fedora logo progress bar in 
plymouth is the same for both bootup and when applying updates.

cheers
ryanlerch
>
> - Replace the small print logo on the login screen with a bigger one
>
> The idea here is to replace the small-print Fedora text logo that we currently have in that corner by the same Fedora logo thats used in plymouth, so that it remains unchanged as we transition from plymouth to gdm.
>
> What do you think ?

>
>
> Matthias
>