Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Ryan Lerch]

On 03/11/2013 01:55 PM, Alec Leamas wrote:
> On 2013-03-11 18:49, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>> On Mon, 11.03.13 12:58, 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.
>> We should not only turn off the graphical screen, but the entire thing
>> should get turned off unless the user presses some key.
>>
>> This is probably relatively easy to do, we'd just need remove a lot of
>> module loading lines from the generated grub.conf.
> Fine with me, but don't forget to  have a hint to this key visible e. 
> g.,  "Press F1 to..." in some corner. Current
> policy that user  just should know the key is not that good IMHO. 
> After all, this is the first screen a newcomer
> meets. And thisis not only about the initial grub boot but also the 
> "main" boot process (and screen)  that follows.

With regards to a label on the screen instructing the user how to show 
the hidden preboot menu (GRUB), It is clutter that is not needed. It 
makes boot up longer, as that screen will need to appear on the screen 
long enough for the user to read, at which point why not just display 
the preboot menu?

cheers,
ryanlerch