The 9.10 boot loader progress bar

Joe Zimmerman joe.zimmerman.10 at gmail.com
Mon Jan 25 16:48:36 UTC 2010


On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:41 AM, John Dong <jdong at ubuntu.com> wrote:

>  > It's familiar, and when something stalls it's suddenly not familiar.
> > I don't have to care WHAT it's doing, just as long as it's doing
> > something, and telling me what it's doing.  Apple used to do this in
> > System 7 and System 8 at least by showing icons during boot,
> > signifying what part of the boot process it was currently in.
> There is no "part" of bootup progress anymore. Everything happens together
> in parallel as long as its dependencies are met, and can be arbitrary order
> during bootup. IO traffic in an unrelated bootup job can cause a seemingly
> small other job to "stall".
>
> It's not at all surprising that non-linear booted OS'es like OS X 10.4+,
> Ubuntu with Upstart, Windows 2000+, etc do not attempt to show a linear
> progress bar.
>

Why not show a panel of greyed-out icons at the bottom of the screen, one
for each major component, and light up each icon as the corresponding
component is initialized? This would reflect the correct abstraction (and if
the icons had captions, users would have some idea of what was wrong if the
boot process stalled).
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