Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Anyway, here is a proposal for an alternative way to deal with the boot
sequence.

1. the bootloader screen is no longer themed with colour backgrounds but
is predominantly black and white. Boot is transitioning from a black shut
down screen so any colour or grey background is going to flash. (Microsoft
understood this fact years ago. They killed their old win9x colour
background boot image)

2. Bootloader entries are prefixed by a small paragraph of text that
explains they are safety options that should be used in case of problem.
If you can localize it so much the better but from a user POW an English
message is better than no message at all and silent failing. This is the
last screen the user will see before boot craps itself, so it needs to be
helpful not pretty.

In case input has not been initialised yet it needs to at least provide a
pointer to a web page that explains how to rescue the system (letting
users google is not good. The only thing they will find is messages from
other users that had boot problems, which will reinforce their feeling
Fedora is not reliable).

3. if you want to cheer it up you can add a fire extinguisher icon or
something else that conveys safety measure to an i18n audience.

4. that is the only theming that should occur. No colour experiments, no
Fedora logo, no video mode switches, nothing to distract from the message

5. the default wait period is at least 5 seconds, maybe as much as 10.

6. any successful boot (where actual non automatic user activity occurs
after the boot, and software shutdown completes) temporarily overrides the
wait period and shortens it for the next boot to the minimal value that
lets the user react (2-3 s IIRC from the discussion). So a hardware reset
or battery pull restores the full default wait. As long as everything is
fine users get short boots.

7. any detected problem, or dangerous operation such as kernel update
resets the wait time till successful boot occurs again (see 6)

8. the wait periods are settable in kickstart so vm farm, embedded people,
and Lennart can set it to zero if they feel like it. At zero it will flash
too fast for users to notice (esp. if the screen is predominantly black).

9. after a few releases the wait period default values are reevaluated by
FESCO, based on the actual in-the-field observed reliability of the error
detection heuristics (ie build the new safety net before removing the old
one)

Sincerely,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot