Improving the Fedora boot experience
Hi,
I would love to see F19 make a good first impression. The first time you see something
Fedora-related on the screen currently is the graphical grub screen, followed by the
filling-in-Fedora of Plymouth, followed by the gdm login screen. Grub in particular is
problematic, with a starfield background that looks like a Fedora background from a few
releases ago and a progress bar that indicates the progress in 'booting the
bootloader'.
There are also some issues on the login screen, with Fedora logo being at small-print size
right now.
I think a few simple changes we can make a big improvement to the visual experience for
F19:
- Turn off the graphical grub screen
Even if we are not able to suppress the boot menu entirely, or having a clean boot menu
like this:
https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock...,
avoiding the graphical screen will be a win in terms of reduced visual noise.
- Switch to a simple spinner for the plymouth theme
This theme is available in plymouth today:
https://raw.github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/system-lock...
I know when we've proposed this in the past, there was concern about loosing the one
place where the Fedora logo is visible in the boot. I'd like to propose a compromise
that will keep the Fedora logo _and_ improve the transition to the login screen: How about
we use the spinner as in that mockup, but add a reasonably-sized Fedora logo in the top
left corner.
- Replace the small print logo on the login screen with a bigger one
The idea here is to replace the small-print Fedora text logo that we currently have in
that corner by the same Fedora logo thats used in plymouth, so that it remains unchanged
as we transition from plymouth to gdm.
What do you think ?
Matthias
