On Tue, Oct 18, 2022 at 10:43 PM Ben Cotton bcotton@redhat.com wrote:
There should be new options for resetting the persistent overlay and booting with no persistence. The default options should boot with persistence and setup of persistence should work.
Neal, Matt, what is the rationale for enabling persistence for the default boot option? I have mixed opinions about this. One of the benefits of a Live image, as we use it today, is that it's always the same/fresh. If I use it and then hand it over to a friend/colleague, I don't need to worry that some personal files (like a browser history) were left behind. I also don't need to worry that I (or the previous user) made some changes which would negatively impact the installation process or my user environment (like configuring a different keymap, or installing some updates). It's always as the creators intended. With the proposed Change, suddenly I need to care and need to worry.
My impression is that currently persistence use is basically non-existent. Our well-advertised tools like Fedora Media Writer don't support it. Even if we flip this to make it easily available (which is probably a good thing), how many users do you estimate would actually want to make use of it? Who would want to work from a Live image regularly? I'm sure there are some use cases, but they seem so niche to me, that making it a non-default boot option wouldn't be a problem at all.
I wonder if you've thought about this and why you decided to propose making it enabled by default. Thanks.