Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Jan Dvořák]

Hi,

first of all, I respect your work very much and am actually very
grateful for avahi, pulseaudio and systemd as I was for ifplugd
back in the old days when Gentoo was cool.

> Fast boot times matter to dual-boot users, they matter to everybdoy who
> doesn't run his system 24/7,

That is indeed very true and the experience of rebooting to Windows to
play a few games with friends sucks because of long shutdown and bootup
times.

On the other hand, from my experience the situation frequently requires
making tee, rearanging furniture and preparing waterpipe charcoal which
means lot of confusion and running around.  I have witness, several times,
people booting back to their default system and having to go through the
reboot once again just because they have missed the OS selection dialog.

You might have noticed that Microsoft goes with 20 second timeout on
Windows/Windows dual-boot systems.  I am sure there is a reason for that.

> Fast boot times matter on desktops, they matter on embedded, they matter
> on mobile, they matter or servers, they matter everywhere.

As have already been mentioned before, POSTing server takes so long
that GRUB delay is hardly noticeable.  But what is worse, if you miss
the kernel selection dialog on a server, you look at UP TO FIVE MORE
MINUTES of waiting for the damn thing before you get another attempt.

I have worked with IBM, Dell and HP remote management consoles and one
thing can be guaranteed -- if you give user less than 2s time window
after display mode switch, she *will* frequently miss the keystroke.


So, what would be the solution that will actually help on laptops
while keeping benefits of the current system where people need them?
I am thinking of a "Reboot To" dialog in GNOME, which will help with
dual-booting. Next, add anaconda option to toggle GRUB prompt and
autodetect it's default state, which will speed up boot on laptops
while keeping sysadmins sane.
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