Booting in the dark

Kristoffer Ericson kristoffer.ericson at gmail.com
Sat Feb 20 12:43:47 EST 2010


On Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:36:28 -0500
Gerald A <geraldablists at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 

And all those are known for their open-ness? I got an iphone
2 days ago, and its already pissing me off that it keeps the
good stuff under locks.


> > 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.
> 

Its better to see that something is happening rather than
seeing an fullscreen logo and "hoping" that it boots.
And its not like we are asking them to do anything, just sit back.
And after awhile they will even have an vague idea of what is suppose to happen.


> 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?


-- 
Kristoffer Ericson <kristoffer.ericson at gmail.com>




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