Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 3:49 PM, Michael Cronenworth <mike at cchtml.com> wrote:

> Does any other computing device you own prompt you for a boot menu? Your
> mobile phone? Your TV (which likely has embedded Linux)? Your car?
> Windows? OS X?
>
> Why is that? Could it be because a boot menu is not necessary for normal
> operation? A normal user doesn't need to wonder "Hey what kernel do I
> need to boot today?" every time their system boots.

And a napking is not necessary for normal eating. Nevetheless, most of
us spill enough crumbs or get enough smears on our faces from messy
food that it's often useful.  And enough of us do kernel selection for
configuration testing, or dual-boot systems with Linux on one disk and
Windows on another partition or disk, that it's quite useful.
Virtualization has eased the need for this, but I've needed to get at
grub 3 times this month in development environments.

> There is a time when developers need to distance themselves from
> user-interfaces and realize they are not the only user of the
> user-interface. This is one of those times.

And the main lesson her is "don't clutter the user interface with
useless graphical eye candy". It makes the boot process require
unnecessary system resources. The new Fedora installation setup is
currently a *nightmare*. It works very poorly through low bandwidth
remote connections, the graphics are poorly labeled and very
confusing, and the "spoke and hub" model is a bit of big vision
coneptual weirdness that is actively preventing people from wanting to
touch Fedora. It's an *installer*, keeping it as lightweight and
simple as possible with minimal graphics means that it will display
better on small virtual system or remote KVM displays. But this has
been discarded in favor or an overly bulky and complex system that is
showing off what are quite fragile graphical features rather than
simply doing the *job*.