[Design-team] Fedora GRUB2 boot menu, from design perspective

Wed Jun 20 07:40:38 UTC 2012

I'm thinking of the bigger picture besides this submenu. Again, without
literally watching every single dev change and being on the QA team how am
I supposed to know everything that's changed.

"Oh btw in Fedora 18 you have to go to advanced boot options to boot an
older kernel now. Yeah I know, we've been able to do this for 20 years now
since the dawn of time but they think it's better for novice users this
way."

Just 1 example of many things. You can't expect Fedora to be a distro that
you can really settle and get "used to" when it's constantly changing.

I know this is the whole point of the whole distro, to be "bleeding edge"
and have the latest technologies in our awesome distro.

Again, I go with a "If it aint broke don't fix it" mentality into things.

In my daily life I'm a sysadmin. Figuring out how to do something on RHEL 5
vs RHEL 6 vs CentOS 5 vs CentOS 6 vs Fedora 13 Fedora 14 Fedora 15 Fedora
16 Fedora 17 Fedora 18 and what's different between each and every single
one is annoying in every day life at work.

"Oh yeah so dude on Fedora 17 they moved to systemd. That service command
doesn't work the same way and neither does chkconfig either anymore. Sorry
bro deal with it."

Dan

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:26 AM, Elad Alfassa <elad at fedoraproject.org>wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Dan Mashal <dan.mashal at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> To further add to my previous email, don't forget about your core user
>> base. Since you are aiming for the "novice user" what happens to the
>> "expert/intermediate user base"?
>>
>> Do you just neglect them and they just accept all the changes you make in
>> order to make Fedora more "Novice friendly"?
>>
>> So what happens to the guy that's been doing things the way it's been
>> done for 10+ years and you change it on him and he has to relearn
>> everything all over again?
>>
>> You now just turned and intermediate/expert user into a novice user. I
>> find that counterproductive.
>>
> Oh really? I don't see how having a submenu for older kernel versions will
> make expert users need to "relearn" anything.
>
>>
>> Just shedding a different way of thinking on the matter. I respect
>> everyone's contributions I'm just making my own personal opinion and voice
>> heard since that what is so awesome about this community is that I can say
>> how I feel and contribute my opinion while it may not be taken as "Oh my
>> god this guy is so right what were we thinking?" it's definitely something
>> to think about.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Dan
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:18 AM, Dan Mashal <dan.mashal at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Quote: "Simply because we want to make Fedora easier to use. For novice
>>> users, the kernel versions are just noise, they mean nothing, and probably
>>> cause a lot of confusion. Especially if they dual-boot, they wouldn't know
>>> what to choose, and might actually boot an older kernel regularly.
>>>
>>> Furthermore, you can always revert to the current behaviour by simply
>>> editing some configuration files."
>>>
>>> If you wanted to make it easier for "novice users" then why do novice
>>> users have to do so much work out of the box to get stuff working? This is
>>> such a minor fix for "novice users".
>>>
>>> "Novice users" use Ubuntu. Think about why. I understand that Ubuntu and
>>> Fedora have different "religious" philosophies but this is reality without
>>> getting too in the the actual "religion" of FOSS and the 4 foundations of
>>> Fedora.
>>>
>>> Quote "Without release number? what if you have both Rawhide and 17
>>> installed?
>>>
>>> I think it should be Fedora $number"
>>>
>>> So a "novice user" would have Rawhide installed? :)
>>>
>>> A novice user just wants it to "work" "out of the box".
>>>
>>> I mean it's really that simple.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:09 AM, Elad Alfassa <elad at fedoraproject.org>wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 5:08 AM, Dan Mashal <dan.mashal at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Personal opinion from a longtime fedora user:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1) Why do I have to go to a separate menu to choose a different
>>>>> kernel? Granted, I don't often have to choose an older or custom kernel but
>>>>> "If it ain't broke don't fix it."
>>>>>
>>>>  Simply because we want to make Fedora easier to use. For novice users,
>>>> the kernel versions are just noise, they mean nothing, and probably cause a
>>>> lot of confusion. Especially if they dual-boot, they wouldn't know what to
>>>> choose, and might actually boot an older kernel regularly.
>>>> Furthermore, you can always revert to the current behaviour by simply
>>>> editing some configuration files.
>>>>
>>>>>  2) It should just be "Fedora".
>>>>>
>>>> Without release number? what if you have both Rawhide and 17 installed?
>>>> I think it should be Fedora $number
>>>>
>>>>>  3) I don't like the way the grub menu looks right now with or without
>>>>> the theme. I like the old text non ubuntu/debian looking grub menu but
>>>>> that's just the oldskool person in me talking.
>>>>>
>>>>  Well, I like how it looks with the theme, but if you don't like it you
>>>> could always make your own theme to make it look like you want, or talk
>>>> with upstream grub and explain to them why you think the default doesn't
>>>> look good.
>>>>
>>>>> EOF
>>>>>
>>>>> Dan
>>>>> On Jun 19, 2012 1:07 AM, "Elad Alfassa" <elad at fedoraproject.org>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 10:21 AM, Máirín Duffy <
>>>>>> duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>>>>> > Hi Elad,
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > On Mon, 2012-06-18 at 18:07 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
>>>>>> >> refer to this thread in -devel:
>>>>>> >>
>>>>>> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2012-June/168712.html
>>>>>> >>
>>>>>> >> As I understand, by design, we wanted the older kernels to appear
>>>>>> in
>>>>>> >> the "Advanced options" menu, but right now, it breaks every time
>>>>>> you
>>>>>> >> run a kernel update.
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > Yeh, it definitely sounds like broken behavior. Maybe we should get
>>>>>> > together with Josh Boyer and Peter Jones and see if we can't figure
>>>>>> out
>>>>>> > some way to have older kernels go under the submenu.
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> >> Also, the string Fedora Linux is kinda wrong, cause the OS is
>>>>>> called
>>>>>> >> Fedora.
>>>>>> >> It should be something like Fedora (with Linux kernel version
>>>>>> here).
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> >> What is the stand of the design team on this?
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > Well, fwiw, I think you're correct, it should just be 'Fedora'
>>>>>> (Maybe
>>>>>> > Fedora + $RELEASE_NUMBER) not 'Fedora Linux.' However, I think the
>>>>>> > kernel versions should be in the submenu with, if I understand
>>>>>> > correctly, the older kernels listed out, but the newest one should
>>>>>> just
>>>>>> > say Fedora. Is that too extreme?
>>>>>> Sounds reasonable. Show kernel versions only when they are really
>>>>>> needed.
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > ~m
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> >
>>>>>> > _______________________________________________
>>>>>> > design-team mailing list
>>>>>> > design-team at lists.fedoraproject.org
>>>>>> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> --
>>>>>> -Elad Alfassa.
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> design-team mailing list
>>>>>> design-team at lists.fedoraproject.org
>>>>>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> design-team mailing list
>>>>> design-team at lists.fedoraproject.org
>>>>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> -Elad Alfassa.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> design-team mailing list
>>>> design-team at lists.fedoraproject.org
>>>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> design-team mailing list
>> design-team at lists.fedoraproject.org
>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
>>
>
>
>
> --
> -Elad Alfassa.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> design-team mailing list
> design-team at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/attachments/20120620/47bb2edd/attachment-0001.html>