Improving the Fedora boot experience

Matthias Clasen mclasen at redhat.com
Mon Mar 11 16:58:05 UTC 2013


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



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