Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Casey Dahlin <cdahlin at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 08:01:54AM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> And the main lesson her is "don't clutter the user interface with
>> useless graphical eye candy". It makes the boot process require
>> unnecessary system resources. The new Fedora installation setup is
>> currently a *nightmare*. It works very poorly through low bandwidth
>> remote connections, the graphics are poorly labeled and very
>> confusing, and the "spoke and hub" model is a bit of big vision
>> coneptual weirdness that is actively preventing people from wanting to
>> touch Fedora. It's an *installer*, keeping it as lightweight and
>> simple as possible with minimal graphics means that it will display
>> better on small virtual system or remote KVM displays. But this has
>> been discarded in favor or an overly bulky and complex system that is
>> showing off what are quite fragile graphical features rather than
>> simply doing the *job*.
>
> Citation needed. Anaconda has been graphical for ages, and has probably gotten
> lighter after the rewrite if anything.
>
> --CJD

There's a reason I've tended to use the "linux text" option, which
has, unfortunately, all but been discarded or been made useless with
curses based tools that no longer match the options of the X based
GUI's. And lighter or not, the GUI still takes longer to load and to
browse around, especially in poor quality graphical environments. We
don't all hae a bit screen to play with, some of us are working
through virtualization systems or remote KVM's with limited and
burdensome graphical tools that the X based installer hinders.  Try
installing an older or vaguely recent Fedora with pure text mode or a
serial console, especially when your remote site can't afford real
remote KVM's and has  a serial concentrator.