Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Máirín Duffy]

On 03/13/2013 09:28 AM, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> 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

Um, what?
>
>> "- Changing video modes makes the screen flash unnecessarily.
> 
> This is an aesthetics argument

You could say that. You could also say that it's an annoyance and causes
X issues (which it does), which you decided to separate out as if I
listed it as a different issue rather than the *same* issue.

>> 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.

Showing the screen makes that happen, so if you're arguing for showing
the screen by default you are arguing 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.

How was it incomplete?

>> - 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.

See below quoted snippet split out. The 'or' is pretty key grammatically.
> 
>> 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.

Peter has already explained that the error detection mechanism here is
very extensible.
> 
>> - 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.

We probe twice when we don't need to.
> 
>> -  (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.

I would argue that throwing information up in people's faces 100% of the
time when it's useless to over 95% of those people is like throwing a
text in Japanese at a non-Japanese English speaker in the hopes that
somehow they would be able to read it and magically become fluent in
Japanese.

Yes, if you speak Japanese natively, it's quite easy for you and
difficult for you to understand how anybody would struggle with it.
You're a native speaker. Most people aren't.

~m