Improving the Fedora boot experience
blog.linuxgrrl.com
blog.linuxgrrl.com
Year of Linux on the desktop, here we come!
I don't think that the runlevel numbers are sequential. You can switch between levels (and that corresponds to more or less services running) but you pretty much boot directly to runlevel 5.
Within a runlevel, services are ordered, though (either by an arbitrary integer or by dependency).
Haven't major distros been doing this for years? I only see the output if I press escape, and pressing escape again suppresses it. Otherwise I just see a progress bar/animation.
But in Fedora we do have early access to the framebuffer. Plymouth uses that to display the animated Fedora logo and to prompt for any encryption passphrases.
The hardware needs to support it though, so you may not see this, especially when running in a virtual environment.
When it works right it looks pretty nice, you get a mostly seamless graphic screen after grub2 until gdm. And you can always hit ESC to see the scrolling systemd startup messages.
I seems that RH copies Canonical's idea to make something looking "good" and sell it to fans of eye candy who happen to own machines unaffected by bugs.
The most important aspects of UI are about presenting information in a way that is comprehensible. Flashing error messages on screen for less than a second is confusing--either the information is important and needs to be visible for longer, or it should be relegated to a log file somewhere.
Upthread, someone said that showing all the output of the init scripts in a tty feels cheap. I agree that it feels cheap--and it feels cheap because it suggest something about the computer. Older OSes spent a lot of time displaying initialization script outputs to the screen because that you had to know about it. At any time, that shit might be broken, and you (or your sysadmin) would have to reconfigure it. That's the wrong message to send to your average Ubuntu user.
So if you thought that complaint or many of the complaints from the initial article were about "eye candy" you were wrong.
And BTW, I'm a big fan of printing output of init scripts to console, provided that it's nice and concise (as it used to be in most distros few years ago) because it greatly aids debugging when (not if) stuff breaks. It's one of the reasons I left Windows, actually.