Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Allan Day]

Hi all,

On the question of how kernel versions should be accessed, I am very
much in favour of the position that Chris Murphy expressed earlier:
choosing a kernel version is opaque to most users and requires fairly
advanced technical knowledge to understand. Invitations to access boot
options (such as a string reading "Press Esc to access boot options")
run the risk of enticing people into a part of the UI that isn't
useful and that they don't understand. Having a key (or keys) that you
need to know about to access these options makes a lot of sense: the
people who know about booting kernel versions will go looking for a
way to access the menu [1], if they don't know the menu already. Those
who don't know what the menu is for can happily ignore it.

It's also worth remembering that even those users who do understand
what it means to boot into a different kernel will do so infrequently.

With regards to the question of which key or keys should be used for
accessing the menu, it seems like a good idea to avoid keys that are
already used for accessing BIOS options: if we are going to be telling
people to turn their machine on and hold down a key, we don't want
them ending up in their BIOS configuration by accident. Common keys
for that include F1, F2, F10, Del or Esc. Perhaps Ctrl would make a
good choice for us.

In terms of the the look and feel of the grub menu and boot progress,
I think it's important that we ensure consistency with the login
screen and try to have as little visual noise as possible (meaning
that we need to keep the number of visual transitions to a minimum),
since this will communicate quality and robustness to users. In that
respect, a minimal boot screen with a plain black background followed
by a boot progress screen that uses the same background as GNOME login
would be a big step forward.

Allan

[1] The main requirement here is that a Google search gives you the
answer when you go looking for it. :)