Boot screen: Quiet or not?

[Hugo Heden]

On 10/6/07, John Richard Moser <nigelenki at comcast.net> wrote:
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> I brought this up when this first happened, now I'll bring it up again
> and see what people think after a few releases.
>
> The boot screen in Ubuntu has used a model where it displays an image
> and a progress bar for a while now.  Knocking off "quiet" in the boot
> line changes this behavior to include a running log of what's going on
> (loading drivers, starting ssh, bringing up GDM...).  The reason I was
> given for the default "quiet" mode was that the system seemed "More
> polished" this way; although I've seen someone argue that specifically
> having Grub flash a cryptic message for 1/2 a second about something
> "startles and scares the user," and only reference the rest of the boot
> sequence by proxy (I guess words in general scare users).
>
> Personally I think it's "more polished" to see what the system is doing.
>  To be specific, when my system boots it's doing exactly one thing:
> BOOTING.  It takes it 30 seconds or more to do only that, which is
> inexcusable.  Now, with "quiet" knocked off my system is doing a number
> of things and it seems reasonable that it might take it a little time.
> An unpolished system will either give zero feedback, or will feed me
> lines of cryptic status codes (loading <long_path>/driver.ko into
> <memory address> etc for each driver?).
>
> What's the overall experience of the user community been on this?  It's
> obviously a trivial detail but it was important enough for the specific
> change in the first place right?
>

Hi,

Disclaimer: Regular non-techie user here.

I used SUSE 9.3 some years ago, and they had a nice balance: A splash
screen displaying a logo (just like Ubuntu is doing now) *but* with a
little label in the upper left corner saying "Press Esc to see boot
progress messages". If I recall correctly.

When pressing Esc, the boot messages were displayed, but not in the
"raw console" graphical style as in a console (you know, Ctrl-Alt-F1),
but in  a nice spashy and colored style, still using the
"Ctrl-Alt-F7-console".

They messages displayed were the regular cryptical ones -- this was
not polished or adapted in any way.

I liked that -- it gave a *more* polished impression, while giving the
user the option to see what was going on and perhaps to educate
herself some degree in the process.

The current Ubuntu way is ok, but I would prefer the SUSE way.

Also, if I understand correctly (which is highly unlikely though),
there seem to be a couple of technical issues with the current Ubuntu
way:

1) If I want to see the boot messages, I press Ctrl-Alt-F1, but then I
can not get the splash-screen back by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F7. That gives
an unpolished impression.

2) When in the Ctrl-Alt-F1 console, I can/have to press Ctrl-Alt-F8 to
see *further* boot messages. This may be expected behaviour but feels
a little weird.

3) When in the Ctrl-Alt-F1- or F8-console, rather late in the boot
process (when gdm is started?) the console is switched over to
Ctrl-Alt-F7 to display the login screen. This may be expected
behaviour but feels a little weird. (One could argue that if the user
has chosen a console, then the system should stay with that console.)
(This might be a work-around for (1)?)

Best Regards

Hugo Heden