Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Máirín Duffy]

>> On 13 March 2013 12:46, Máirín Duffy <duffy at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>> 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?

On 03/13/2013 11:30 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 20 years+ of experience with Linux and more with other OSes :-)

Ah, okay, so you *are* completely ill-equipped to understand a casual
user's experience then?

> 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, in some students cases, their reaction was to simply plug out
their live USB stick, boot into windows, and try to create their project
on there. Not exactly the kind of reaction we'd like to see, is it?

> 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.

Nope, the live media were pre-configured for their keyboard layouts and
timezone, and all of the software they needed was pre-installed. They
did have issues getting Flash to work, but that's not really something
we can do much about.
> 
> 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.

Cool!

> 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.

Yeah, unfortunately this was an Inkscape and Gimp class, not an
Operating Systems 101 class. We didn't cover the bootloader, the init
system, the terminal, or anything like that.

>> 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.

How many teens and pre-teens do you know who actually play with toys
rather than computers, tablets, and smartphones? Seriously? Do you know
any teens or pre-teens?

~m