Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Ryan Lerch]

On 03/11/2013 04:56 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mon, 11.03.13 21:40, Björn Persson (bjorn at rombobjörn.se) wrote:
>
>> Lennart Poettering wrote:
>>>> 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?
>> No, those 15 seconds were my argument for why it should NOT be done
>> that way. As I already wrote, if the Grub menu is simply displayed,
>> then five seconds is enough. Much better. And if you want to save those
>> five seconds you just need to press Enter.
> No, 0s are about enough. Press some key while boot up your machine,
> that's fine.

So just to clarify,  just have a key (or keys) that need to be *held 
down* when you turn on your machine, that brings up GRUB? This is a 
great approach!

--ryanlerch

>
> (And on EFI systems that do not initialize USB anymore during POST, you
> have to go through the OS to get into the boot loader anyway...)
>
> Lennart
>