Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Máirín Duffy]

On 03/12/2013 07:24 PM, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> I am saying this because I agree. To me the proposal (not the original
> but some point in the the 500 ms boot time "ideal" ) seemed very much
> a welded shut view. And as someone who has to worked on welded shut
> computers for asthetic reasons.. it brings out the fighting urge in
> me.

Did you guys actually read the blog post? Is aesthetics cited in any of
the reasons for hiding the menu? No, it's not. These were the reasons I
cited in favor of the proposal to hide the menu:


"- Changing video modes makes the screen flash unnecessarily. Not
displaying the boot menu by default would eliminate some of this
flashing. The video mode changing also screws up how our X setup works
and results in unnecessary bugs for users.

- We used to suppress the boot menu by default in earlier releases and
its suppression didn’t cause major problems.

- There’s other ways for the user to indicate wanting to enter the menu
besides boot-time keypresses – other OSes have methods to enter these
menus by rebooting from a running system (systemd is working on this) or
automatically loading the menu when an error condition is encountered.

- Not listening for keypresses doesn’t probe USB, meaning not waiting
for keypresses will make boot even faster since we won’t have to
load/probe USB.

-  (Nobody explicitly stated this, but) Displaying information geared
towards power users by default is intimidating / confusing to
less-knowledgeable users."

Please be fair.

~m