Improving the Fedora boot experience

Lennart Poettering mzerqung at 0pointer.de
Mon Mar 11 20:20:03 UTC 2013


On Mon, 11.03.13 20:41, Björn Persson (bjorn at rombobjörn.se) wrote:

> Ryan Lerch wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> Yes, why not display the Grub menu?
> 
> Whether any text is displayed or not, there still needs to be a long
> enough pause that the user has time to press a key. Not displaying any
> text at all would make it harder to understand that the time to press
> that key is now. Many people won't even understand that they have an
> opportunity to press a key.
> 
> If the menu is displayed, it takes only a few seconds to understand
> that there is a choice and a countdown, and hopefully most people will
> quickly discover that pressing a key stops the countdown. Thus five
> seconds is a long enough pause.
> 
> If some text like "Press Esc now to choose which operating system to
> boot." would be displayed, then the pause would need to be long enough
> for the user to read and understand the instruction and then reach for
> the right key – and the terser the text is made the harder it will be to
> understand. I estimate that at least 15 seconds would be needed. Adding
> "Press Enter to save a few seconds." would make it even more text to
> read and understand.

Yikes. On a modern system the BIOS POST finishes within 500ms, and
kernel+userspace in 2s. And you want us to spend 15s for nothing in the
boot loader, for a feature only the fewest people need, and those who
need anyway know how to get?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.


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