I was reading the feature list for Fedora 8 and was disappointed when I came across the "Better Startup Experience". http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureBetterStartup
After reading the "Plan for improvement" section, I find it discomforting such a major change will be done to the existing very working/stable rhgb boot process.
1) Do away with the grub menu by default Why? That is the first question that came to mind. A large number of linux users dual-boot multiple OSes. It also is useful when you have multiple kernel versions installed; if you set the time-out to 3 seconds do you really notice it? 2) Switch to graphical Mode in initrd, draw an animation.... I have an animation now in rhgb, and as a bonus I can see all my services loading if I hit the "more" button. I trust this feature will not go away? 3) rhgb goes away ?reinvent the wheel?
This sounds a lot like the useless Mac OS X boot sequence in which a little circle is animated in the middle of the screen. That tells the user nothing what is going on in the boot process and is a pile of crap. Almost as brilliant as the Windows Vista loading screen.
I'd be curious to hear others thoughts on this; I can't be the only user out there who likes to know his system is indeed booting up and what it is doing. Is this really the direction we want for the fedora-desktop environment? Simply cloning other OSes poor user interface decisions?
desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org