Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 12 March 2013 09:00, Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On 03/12/2013 08:30 AM, Fabian Deutsch wrote:
>> What about pulling the message stuff into plymouth and using dracut to
>> trigger a reboot which shows the grub menu? Something along the lines:
>> "Press ESC to see deatils or 'b' to enter the bootloader"
>
> This is an interesting idea, but I don't think plymouth makes it any
> easier to display CJK & Indic glyphs. (Please someone more technical
> tell me if I'm wrong here, I vaguely remember this being an issue when
> we wanted to add a messagse to fedup)


One of the reasons why the keys to be pressed were displayed on
various BIOS etc in the old days was that while the rest of the text
might not be readable, the Function keys were (nearly) always labeled
F1->F12 so a non-native speaker would know that pressing the key did
something. At that point some sort of OS could be available that could
be customized to a local language was more available. It worked for
many cases because having done technical support via Babelfish for
several years the parts that were easiest to get across were the items
that looked exactly like a keyboard even if it wasn't the native
language one. And the most confusion was when they couldn't see
something easily to get native help.

My belief is that one should engineer to make the 1% of the time when
stuff is horribly broken the easiest to debug even if it impacts the
99% in some cosmetic way. Because most people don't remember the 99%,
they remember that 1% and make it in their mind the 99%. Understanding
that bit of human psychology is what made technical support livable..


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
"Don't derail a useful feature for the 99% because you're not in it."
Linus Torvalds
"Years ago my mother used to say to me,... Elwood, you must be oh
so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I
recommend pleasant. You may quote me."  —James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd