Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Máirín Duffy]

On 03/13/2013 10:57 AM, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> I'm with you that users shouldn't see this by default, but rather e.g.
> upon encountering an error condition (or if configured differently).
> However, we still could use better wording for such a message, even if
> we restrict ourselves to English, e.g.: "Press <keycombo> if you want to
> change how your system starts." That's hardly in the league of Japanese
> for someone not speaking it.

Why not put it in the control panel on the running system along with
other system-level options, though? Doesn't that make more sense rather
than separating it out for access only in a completely different context?

I mean, I 100% agree if you can't boot, it should pop up automatically.

But for cases where you've booted into the machine and just noticed your
network doesn't work - we don't automatically notice if the network
isn't working and reboot into the boot options screen, and I'm not sure
if that would make any sense because there's more reasons the network
might not be working besides a new broken kernel update.

In that situation my first instinct would be to go into the control
panel and poke around and see if there was something I could fix there,
and maybe search online for an answer. My first instinct would not be to
reboot the system and go into the bootloader menu - it's not intuitive
that the problem happened because of a new kernel, and usually when I
find myself in that situation it really does take me a while to think it
might be a new kernel with a broken driver. I mean, it could be other
things too - for example, my network card could be turned off in network
manager (has happened before, when i turned off wireless after a plane
trip).

If I just wanted to explore my options with configuring the computer, I
would also go to the control panel first to poke around - again I
wouldn't think to reboot the system and poke around with the menus
there, I really feel it's not intuitive to configure a particular system
before the system is even loaded, if that makes sense?

~m