Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Lennart Poettering]

On Mon, 11.03.13 12:58, Matthias Clasen (mclasen at redhat.com) 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.

We should not only turn off the graphical screen, but the entire thing
should get turned off unless the user presses some key. 

This is probably relatively easy to do, we'd just need remove a lot of
module loading lines from the generated grub.conf.

> - 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.

If it was for me I'd remove all of this entirely, and we should get
Plymouth to suppress any kind of fancy output until 10s or so into the
boot (heck, since ply saves performance data from the previous boot it
could even take that into account regarding whether we should show
anything at all). 

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.