Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 03/13/2013 02:23 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
> On 13 March 2013 12:46, Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> On 03/13/2013 12:26 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>>> -  (Nobody explicitly stated this, but) Displaying information geared
>>>> towards power users by default is intimidating / confusing to
>>>> less-knowledgeable users."
>>> I'd call this to be an urban legend. A boot menu is self-explanatory,
>>> even to new-comers.
>>>
>>> It may baffle them when they see it for the first time, but will very
>>> soon get used to it.
>>
>> No, a boot menu is not self-explanatory, and no, this is not an 'urban
>> legend.' How do you even come up with associating the term 'urban
>> legend' to statement saying that a complex screen is confusing to casual
>> computer users?
20 years+ of experience with Linux and more with other OSes :-)

>> I have taught multiple classes of teenage and pre-teen students using
>> Fedora Live USB keys. This necessarily involves having to guide them
>> through using syslinux (which is very similar in appearance to grub) to
>> boot their system, I can say from actual experience that:

>> 1) The boot menu was not self-explanatory, and the students had a lot of
>> questions about what stuff on the screen meant.
And how did it impact their usage experience? I guess, their reaction 
was a "Wazat?", temporary "raising the eyebrow", but then they simply 
went on.

Actually, I would expect your students to have more issues with 
understanding "keyboard layout" selection, "timezones" selection, 
explaining "hw-clock", the concepts behind "updates"/rpm-conflicts and 
so on and would consider the bootloader prompt to have been one 
(ignorable) detail amongst many other much huger problem.

One experiment I did: I sat some relatives and friends (no computer 
iliterates) in front of Gnome3 and asked them to work with it. All of 
threw it away in disgust.

> Then you have good students.
I am having doubts any pre-teen and only some teens are able to 
run/configure any OS and them to be overwhelmed all over the place 
without supervison/prior instructions. Once they have been instructed, 
they likely are able work with it.

> Are teens and pre-teens fedora's main
> target audience now?

I hope not ... I am not interested in converting Fedora or Linux into a toy.

Ralf