Improving the Fedora boot experience

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 13, 2013, at 10:52 AM, Mike Pinkerton <pselists at mindspring.com> wrote:

> 
> 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:

Those advantages come in part due to them being implemented in the firmware, not a stand alone boot manager which is what Fedora would need to rely on to have similar functionality. A 3rd party (U)EFI Boot Manager (GRUB, gummiboot, rEFInd) is a boot application initiated by the native one. So the windows of opportunity for pressing keys becomes much more fine grained.

For BIOS it may be even more limited.


> 
> 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.

It's true that it's quite tolerant, even registering a 1-1.5 seconds after the startup chime. But this also is a function of the firmware's boot manager. The keys chosen must not conflict with keys chosen by the firmware OEM.
> 
> 
> 3.  The key combinations are well-known.  Decades of using the same key combinations have ingrained them in Mac culture.  

This is why I suggest cooperation among distributions and boot managers, via BootLoaderSpec, to agree on the function of keys. It should be ingrained linux culture, ideally, not merely Fedora.

If the boot manager is hidden by default, the boot manager isn't knowable to the user, so differing keyboard shortcuts to functionality causes a huge mess. "Well it's F on Fedora GRUB, but B on gummiboot and rEFInd, and U for Ubuntu GRUB, and …" now we need a decoder ring. Not good for linux IMO.

Also, avoiding conflict with the native boot manager is needed. Clearly on Macs, the 3rd party boot manager can't use command-V, N, T, C, command-S, shift, option/alt, and so on. Other firmware OEMs presumably have their own reserved keys. So the add-on boot manager can't use those or the user will invariably trigger the feature for the native boot manager not the add-on boot manager.

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

Firmware specific. F1 and F2 are very common. HP and some Toshibas are Esc.


Chris Murphy