Improving the Fedora boot experience

[John.Florian at dart.biz]

> From: "Nicolas Mailhot" <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>
> 
> Anyway, here is a proposal for an alternative way to deal with the boot
> sequence.
> 
> 1. the bootloader screen is no longer themed with colour backgrounds but
> is predominantly black and white. Boot is transitioning from a black 
shut
> down screen so any colour or grey background is going to flash. 
(Microsoft
> understood this fact years ago. They killed their old win9x colour
> background boot image)
> 
> 2. Bootloader entries are prefixed by a small paragraph of text that
> explains they are safety options that should be used in case of problem.
> If you can localize it so much the better but from a user POW an English
> message is better than no message at all and silent failing. This is the
> last screen the user will see before boot craps itself, so it needs to 
be
> helpful not pretty.
> 
> In case input has not been initialised yet it needs to at least provide 
a
> pointer to a web page that explains how to rescue the system (letting
> users google is not good. The only thing they will find is messages from
> other users that had boot problems, which will reinforce their feeling
> Fedora is not reliable).
> 
> 3. if you want to cheer it up you can add a fire extinguisher icon or
> something else that conveys safety measure to an i18n audience.
> 
> 4. that is the only theming that should occur. No colour experiments, no
> Fedora logo, no video mode switches, nothing to distract from the 
message
> 
> 5. the default wait period is at least 5 seconds, maybe as much as 10.
> 
> 6. any successful boot (where actual non automatic user activity occurs
> after the boot, and software shutdown completes) temporarily overrides 
the
> wait period and shortens it for the next boot to the minimal value that
> lets the user react (2-3 s IIRC from the discussion). So a hardware 
reset
> or battery pull restores the full default wait. As long as everything is
> fine users get short boots.
> 
> 7. any detected problem, or dangerous operation such as kernel update
> resets the wait time till successful boot occurs again (see 6)
> 
> 8. the wait periods are settable in kickstart so vm farm, embedded 
people,
> and Lennart can set it to zero if they feel like it. At zero it will 
flash
> too fast for users to notice (esp. if the screen is predominantly 
black).
> 
> 9. after a few releases the wait period default values are reevaluated 
by
> FESCO, based on the actual in-the-field observed reliability of the 
error
> detection heuristics (ie build the new safety net before removing the 
old
> one)
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> -- 
> Nicolas Mailhot
> 
> -- 
> devel mailing list
> devel at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel


If this could be made to work as described, I'd be happy with it.

--
John Florian
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