Improving the Fedora Boot Experience 109
An anonymous reader writes with a link to a recent post on Red Hat senior interaction designer Máirín Duffy's blog with an illuminating look at Red Hat's design process, and how things like graphic elements, widget behavior, and bootup time are taken into account. It starts: "So I have this thing on my desk at Red Hat that basically defines a simple design process. (Yes, it also uses the word 'ideate' and yes, it sounds funny but it is a real word apparently!) While the mailing list thread on the topic at this point is high-volume and a bit chaotic, there is a lot of useful information and suggestions in there that I think could be pulled into a design process and sorted out. So I took 3 hours (yes, 3 hours) this morning to wade through the thread and attempt to do this."
Don't scare regular users of GNU/Linux. (Score:4, Insightful)
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You are exactly right. The original Mac OSX boot-up experience is a nice clean boot up screen with a few simple small icons flying by. The original Mac OS7 OS8 and OS9 bootups have a happy mac icon centered on the screen and the small icons for the addons on the bottom of the screen.
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Linux boot-ups should have a simple graphical or text based boot up that says just a very few simple things:
checking drives
starting network
starting graphics
tada!
and allow for the user to hit one of the function keys or a space bar or something to allow for viewing of the detailed boot-up log. Most people don't really need to see all of the details and would certainly be scared by all of the words and labels that they might not understand. This is one area where OSX actually does a better job.
The whole boot experience sucks. (Score:1, Insightful)
If you want to see how a system should boot, go check out Haiku or OS X. Hell, even Windows does it fairly well.
I can't stand Linux boot processes. Typically there is some over complicated piece of shit bootloader that wants to kick my display into graphical mode so it can puke up distro-themed garbage all over my display for 5 seconds... Then things go black, the kernel starts to vomit verbose crap all over my screen in text mode, then the early graphical boot progress thing fires up X.org for a bit until the startup is complete... Then that goes away, Things drop back to text mode so I can momentarily catch a glimpse of a text mode login screen before X starts AGAIN, finally bringing up my login manager of choice.
Compare this to any sane OS... You get a nice loading widget, maybe change graphical modes once, and your either at your desktop or the login screen. The Linux boot process is totally out of control because nothing is integrated at all. This will never go away until X is considered part of the operating system as a hole and not just another optional package. Linus needs to pull his head out of his ass and put an end to the whole distribution idea, solidify things into a single OS. Then maybe we'll start seeing boot screens as clean and fast a Windows, Haiku, or OS X.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
You can adjust that check frequency setting, 180 days is merely the default. But unless you can schedule to take the file-systems off-line, or put them in read-only mode and run an appropriate "fsck" on them before re-establishing write permission, this is actually a very good idea. There's nothing like the beginning of a disk problem being missed, or a file system corruption tied to a particular bad kernel, to leave a critical system in an unrecoverable state.
For whatever group I work with, whether my own colleages or a business partner, I do try to schedule a reboot of *everything*, and a reboot at least once a year, to make sure that backups are done and tested and all the hardware will reboot successfully when the experts are _not_ available. You might be _amazed_ at the numer of servers described as "it just works" which failed on reboot, and failover systems and redundant connections that were _not_ failing over properly and were _not_ redundant.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I saw this argument in another thread. If you have a modern machine with long uptimes, it means your probably not up ot the latest patch.
I generally reboot my server only when systemd(init), or the kernel is upgraded
Thats about once every two weeks to a month TOPS. I wouldn't brag about having an unpatched machine.