[Design-team] Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Elad Alfassa]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 6:58 PM, Matthias Clasen <mclasen at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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-login-boot/bootmenu.png,
> 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-login-boot/boot.png
> 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
>
> --
> desktop mailing list
> desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org
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This pretty much sums up all reasonable suggestions from the last cycle
(and adds few great ones), and I completely agree with all of them.

so ffiw, I'm completely in favour of this change.

Unfortunately, the clean bootloader mockup will be impossible to achieve
without convincing the Fedora kernel folks it's a good idea.

When Mo reworked the boot menu she wanted to have "Fedora" and "Advanced
options for Fedora" listing all the older kernels. It worked, but the
kernel package didn't use grub2-config and used grubby instead so newly
installed kernels are still added to the main menu. After a discussion in
-devel, the kernel folks listed many technical problems with using
grub2-config (in short: it sucks), and one other argument (that I strictly
disagree with) was that the Fedora userbase is made of users who want to
easily switch kernels for debugging needs and the submenu makes it harder
on them.
Although the latter argument is a complete pile of nonsense, the technical
problems with grub2-config still stand, and your mockup doesn't include the
ability to boot older kernels (this is unfortunately needed because, well,
we suck. Sometimes kernel updates screws things up and we don't want to
leave the user with a non-booting machine. If any of you can think of a
more elegant solution for this problem, I'd be curious to hear it).

I'm not sure if we can fix the grub2-config problems... it is flawed by
design. But perhaps this type of menu will be possible once we drop grub
and start using another bootloader, ie. Gummiboot.

-- 
-Elad Alfassa.
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