Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Alec Leamas]

On 2013-03-11 18:49, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> 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.
Fine with me, but don't forget to  have a hint to this key visible e. 
g.,  "Press F1 to..." in some corner. Current
policy that user  just should know the key is not that good IMHO. After 
all, this is the first screen a newcomer
meets. And thisis not only about the initial grub boot but also the 
"main" boot process (and screen)  that follows.