Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Mike Pinkerton]

On 13 Mar 2013, at 10:16, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> Anyway, here is a proposal for an alternative way to deal with the  
> boot
> sequence.


There have been a number of suggestions that have taken a Windows 8  
approach to this problem -- auto-detecting error conditions or  
enabling one to "reboot" into a boot menu.

I can't say that I'm confident of the error detection, or that I'm  
happy about having to boot once into the "wrong" system just so I can  
"reboot" into a boot menu that will enable me to boot into the  
"right" system.  That doesn't seem particularly efficient or user- 
friendly.

Let me make a case for an Apple approach.  Although the reaction here  
was somewhat dismissive of the various start-up keys that Apple  
enables, the Apple approach does have three great advantages:

1.  In the most frequent case, there is no interruption of the boot  
sequence for the default system.

2.  If one wants to invoke one of the Apple start-up options, the  
normal practice is to hold down the appropriate key, then power on  
the Mac, and continue holding down the key until one hears the start- 
up chime and sees that the system is booting.  There is no short time  
interval that one has to hit just right.  Like big icons on the edge  
of the screen, holding down a key from power on provides the fattest  
target for a user to hit -- sort of Fitts law in a temporal dimension.

3.  The key combinations are well-known.  Decades of using the same  
key combinations have ingrained them in Mac culture.  A new Mac user  
might not know the right key combination, but any mailing list or  
forum will have dozens of Mac users who can quickly recite the key  
combinations for starting from a CD or DVD, clearing the PRAM (a long- 
time voodoo practice among some Mac users), starting target disk  
mode, etc.


In the case of Fedora:

+  If a key were selected -- and I don't think you have to enable all  
of them -- and advertised in all of the user mailing lists, fora,  
Quick Start documentation, Installation Guide, User Guide, etc., then  
within a year or so just about every Fedoran would know and could  
quickly recite to newbies "hold down the F (as in Fedora) key to get  
to advanced boot options."

+  If a user could hold the key down from before power on until the  
boot options menu appeared, then Fedora could still do extremely fast  
booting without presenting the user with a short time interval to  
hit.  If grub finds the keyboard, and detects no "F" key hold down,  
it would continue to boot immediately with no further delay.

I recall there was some objection about BIOS buffer clearing, and  
don't know what problems that would present to this proposal.  On the  
plus side, though, there wouldn't be any need for gnarly auto- 
detection of error conditions.

By the way, in this brave new fast boot world, how is one expected to  
get to the BIOS or firmware set-up programs?

-- 
Mike