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

[Kirk Bridger]

Perhaps we can put some additional solution ideas forward.

As a quasi-novice kernel user I always found it helpful to have the 
kernel versions visible.  When I update Fedora and the nvidia blob 
causes X to fail, I like being able to choose older versions because I 
can't do anything else.  When a pre-upgrade ends up with a non-working 
version, I like to be able to run an older version to stay productive 
while I research the problem.

I'm not an expert user but I don't think I'm novice either.  I don't see 
why we need to *hide* the older versions behind another menu, just 
perhaps make it more clear that the old versions are still functional 
but are not the latest on the machine.

Novice users have the "out" of saying "I don't know what this all means 
but I know I want to launch the most current version".  And if they're 
dropped back here after a failure or two trying the current version they 
can try the older versions.

This all assumes that we're limited to the current console-style menu.  
If we can use HTML/CSS or some other layout and styling we can make this 
info much more parse-able with styling and different font sizes/layout.  
If we can do more than just console can someone send a screenshot of 
what we can do, and maybe we can mock something up?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Welcome to Fedora 17 (BeefyMiracle)

*Current Versions*
Fedora 17 (kernel-3.6.0-1.fc17)
*
Superceded Versions*
Fedora 17 (kernel-3.5.20-3.fc17)
Fedora 17 (kernel-3.5.20-2.fc17)
Fedora 16 (kernel-3.2.10-4.fc16)

*Other Operating Systems*
Microsoft Windows 7
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Happy to hear thoughts on this approach.

Kirk

On 06/20/2012 02:00 AM, Martin Sourada wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 00:40:38 -0700
> Dan Mashal wrote:
>> 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.
>>
> Yeah, it is annoying, but rejecting a change *only* because it is
> change isn't a strong argument. With such reasoning there wouldn't be
> PCs in the first place (and btw. steam engine also works, doesn't
> it, yet trains are now using diesel, if they are not using
> electricity)... Still I think the changes between Fedora/Red Hat
> releases are small compared to differences between
> Fedora/Debian/(Open)Suse or between various M$ operating systems... So
> either deal with it or decrease the number of concurrently "supported"
> releases to sane number.
>
> You know, people who use Fedora (especially those that contribute) often
> multi-boot and, frankly, menu like the following one (the kernel
> versions are semi-random picks of sane numbers out of my head) isn't
> exactly helpful:
>   * Fedora (kernel-3.6.0-1.fc17)
>   * Fedora (kernel-3.5.7-46.fc17)
>   * Fedora (kernel-3.5.7-42.fc17)
>   * Fedora (kernel-3.6.0-1.fc16)
>   * Fedora (kernel-3.5.7-46.fc16)
>   * Fedora (kernel-3.5.7-42.fc16)
>   * CentOS (kernel-2.16.31.4-35.el5)
>   * CentOS (kernel-2.16.31.3-30.el5)
>   * CentOS (kernel-2.16.31.2-21.el5)
>   * Microsoft Windows
>   * Memtest
>
> IMHO it is broken and always was (at the very least it always annoyed
> the hell out of me that fedora release number wasn't present). But
> still, currently it is more broken, because grub2-mkconfig writes
> sub-menued items, while kernel rpm updates grub2 still using the above
> method, which leads to combination of sub-menus and non-sub-menued
> items...
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
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