why is gurb-menu hidden as default?

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2012-02-06 at 18:02 +0100, Jarosław Górny wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Wiadomość napisana w dniu 2012-02-06, o godz. 17:55, przez Reindl  
> Harald:
> >> in your arguments if you have any.
> >
> > why do you not read the arguments?
> >
> > * a new user does not know anything about the menu
> > * a new user fall into a boot problem after update
> 
> 
> If we are considering such a newbie user as you describe, I bet this  
> user does not know if system update installed a new kernel or not.  
> (S)he probably does not know what the kernel is.
> So, why do you assume, such a user, having grub menu *not* hidden,  
> will guess, that in case of boot problem (s)he should try to boot  
> another kernel?

Well, they do. Generally what people do when something is broken and
they don't really know what or how to fix it is twiddle: they look for
something they can poke, and poke it. A boot menu is an excellent
example of a twiddle-able interface, if you always show it: it's right
there, on boot. It's actually just about the only thing the user CAN
twiddle, if booting the default kernel doesn't work - the only bit where
they feel they can influence the process. So, in my experience, that's
what they do: they try a different menu entry. They don't actually
_need_ the knowledge of what the hell they're doing. All they need is
the knowledge that 'this is a menu with different entries and choosing
one of the other ones might make something different happen'.

Obviously this tweaking reflex can lead to disaster in _some_ cases, but
in the case of recovering from a bad kernel, it actually serves people
rather well.

I agree with the kernel team that a better option would be some kind of
smart recovery from failed boot, though.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
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