[Design-team] The boot splash - time to think about it again

[Elad Alfassa]

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 11:14 PM, Martin Sourada <martin.sourada at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Mo,
>
> On Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:09:22 -0400
> Máirín Duffy wrote:
> > (we've had the same plymouth splash for many releases now and I've
> > never seen a single complaint about it.)
> unless I missed a change in the defaults, what you say here is obviously
> not true:
> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.artwork/11725
>
> And yeah, my position stands still the same. Spinfinity looks *much*
> nicer.
>
> As for Elad's original question -- that the boot will take 0.5s on
> hyper-super-"awesomest"-modern hardware means practically nothing.
> You cannot count on your average user to have that. I have a machine
> able to play "easier" 720p h.264 videos, still the boot takes tens of
> seconds at the very least in F17 (haven't measured it lately, it used
> to be around 1 minute, and the speed-up does not seem very
> significant). Furthermore, if a reboot's going to be occasionally
> long, we still need to show something that will not make the user think
> his OS is from the 90s...
>
> And yeah, some way of showing a progress is needed, as long as it's
> meaningful (we *need* a way for a user that the [re]boot is taking long
> because it's fscking, installing updates, re-labelling, whatever; and
> not because something went wrong -- whenever we can).
>
> Cheers,
> Martin
>
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>
The boot will never take 0.5s, but the actual amount of time we show the
Fedora logo itself is the split second when the boot is over and the
display manager is starting up. uptill then it's just a bubble filling in
white.

I think that progress does make sense only when we have long running tasks,
but then we need to actually get selinux and fsck developers to make their
software provide us with progress information. If they do that, and we have
a reliable method of figuring out how to handle this, a progressbar for the
overall boot progress when there's a relabel running will appear "stuck"
because the relabel is just another thing running... I suggest either
throbber+progress bar for long operations or two progress bars, one for
long operation and the other for the overall boot progress.

Mo, me opening this thread doesn't have much to do with the incident to
which you refer. I opened this thread mostly because I think that the
charge theme is not fitting to indicate progress and will look odd when
software updates are installing, and if we want to change it we also want
consistency.



-- 
-Elad Alfassa.
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