Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Björn Persson]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Mon, 11.03.13 17:53, Máirín Duffy (duffy at fedoraproject.org) wrote:
> > Okay, right. The problem with that is, though, that users won't know
> > what it is, which is why maybe it's better to accept across a bunch of
> > different keys? (This makes sense right?)
> 
> Yes, that's what I was suggesting. Maybe accept any of Shift, Esc, or F8
> to get into the boot menu. I don't like Space too much for this, because
> it is too easy to buttdial it, but the others are probably things people
> would try on their own if the wonder what it might be.

Knowing that ↑ and ↓ are used to select entries in the Grub menu I'd
probably try those. I might try Enter if I didn't know that it boots
the selected entry in Grub. Next I might try all the F keys in
sequence, or Insert and Delete since some BIOSes use those. I probably
wouldn't think of Shift or Ctrl as those usually have no effect on
their own. Esc seems counterintuitive because "escape" means to get out
of something and I want to get *into* the bootloader.

Now that I think about it the Pause/Break key seems the most logical.
Pause the boot process is what I want to do after all.

But that's me. Others might try Space or some letter or whatever. To
ensure that everything people will try will work it will have to be so
many keys that it can just as well be all of them.

I fail to see how "buttdialing" would be a significant problem. Could
you explain why you think people are likely to press random keys by
mistake during the boot? I don't think that has ever happened to me.

Björn Persson
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