Boot screen: Quiet or not?

[Bart Silverstrim]

Chanchao wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 20:32 -0400, John Richard Moser wrote:
> 
>> Personally I think it's "more polished" to see what the system is doing.
> 
> My car does many things when I turn the ignition. Unless there's a
> problem, I don't want to know about it.
> 
> My smart-phone does lots of things when starting up. Unless there's a
> problem, I don't want to know about it.  [Heck, I don't even want to see
> the *(#&$@#!% Nokia hand-shake animation.]
> 
> My secretary books all my air travel, calls loads of agencies, checks
> websites, negotiates discounts.  But unless there's a problem, I really
> don't want to know about it.
> 
> For stress free, healthy and enjoyable living I highly recommend *NOT*
> taking in the low level crap that machines or people you employ are
> supposed to deal with as part of their job description or feature-set.  
> 
> Unless there's actually a problem, in which case it *MAY* be appropriate
> to escalate it to my attention. 

While the ignorance is bliss approach seems to work for some people, I 
usually prefer to have at least some feedback, especially now that Linux 
is at the stage where something can be "wrong" but not wrong enough that 
it doesn't appear to be wrong.  There are cases where a quick message of 
a workaround or note during the boot process can give hints of how to 
fix a quirk I run into later on.  It's nice to know that the printing 
system started [ok] or the network card was brought up [ok], or 
sometimes you get a feel if something is wrong when the boot process is 
getting stuck at a particular stage.

*shrug* to each their own, I guess.

Let it be a simple preference flag.  Seems to work for the most part, 
wouldn't it?