Improving the Fedora boot experience

[zan]

On 11 March 2013 17:16, Elad Alfassa <elad at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
>
> 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
>> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
>
>
> 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.
>


I'd also like to see the brltty daemon started too.  Debian have been
doing this for ages, so if you are using a Braille display, you can
install your own machine without help.  This is not the case with
Fedora.

Z.