Booting in the dark

Gerald A geraldablists at gmail.com
Sat Feb 20 11:36:28 EST 2010


On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 4:39 AM, Zeartul <zeartul at gmail.com> wrote:

> we have a community of about 1.000-2.000 users.
> For most of them that was the first time they were faced with linux.
> Over the several months of Dingux existence we got only a single
> complain about the bootscreen.
>

If we're talking about anecdotes, let's look at other devices and their
boot behaviors. Blackberry, iPhone, even my old PalmPilot. None of
these have text bootscreens, and each of them are 100x+ the number
of users. And very few complaints about having no boot messages.


> Moreover, there were people who liked the boot log so much, they
> decided to switch from the graphical user interface to a bash script
> menu for launching the games to still stay in the text mode after the
> booting.
>

What I would say to this is that you have people who like to hack their
devices. That's good.
However, you and I have to realize that MOST people just want to buy
and use a device. No hacking, no command line funniness, no piddling
with conf files.

And I don't think "matrix screens" scare the people, because they
> still see bios and bootloader logs when they turn on their PCs, so
> they should be used to them.
>
> A small qi logo should be all we need.
>

Well, you may think that the command line and "matrix screens" don't
scare people, but in lots of cases they do. Even just opening a CLI
on Windows to do a ping can make people uncomfortable. It's something
that they don't understand, it's outside their experience.

I'm a big advocate of choice -- it's one of the key features of open source
software. Now, if it's impractical or way too hard, the devs can freely
ignore
my suggestion. However, if what I've suggested isn't too hard, it gives
us the best of both worlds -- text boot screens for developers, and nice
images for end users, and an easy way to switch between them.

Is there a practical upside to having a small image with less text on
it that I'm just not seeing?
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