Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mer 13 mars 2013 01:32, Máirín Duffy a écrit :
> 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:

Máirín,

That was uncalled for

> "- Changing video modes makes the screen flash unnecessarily.

This is an aesthetics argument

> The video mode changing also screws up how our X setup works
> and results in unnecessary bugs for users.

Nobody here argued for mode changing.

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

This suppression was IIRC incomplete which is why people let it pass.

> - 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)

This is besides the point, if you are in a running system that means that
the boot was successful.

> or
> automatically loading the menu when an error condition is encountered.

And they are not reliable. It is good enough for them because any hardware
that fails to boot under a commercial OS gets quickly RMA-ed. That is not
the case for Linux.

> - 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.

Most of the systems Fedora runs on use USB devices in one form or another
so this does not matter in real life. You'll need to probe anyway.

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

It is not a power-user oriented screen unless you think normal other never
do updates and never get boot problems. UI is hard. Removing UI elements
that were added to solve user problems is not improving UI. It's the
ostrich approach to difficult decisions.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot