Boot screen: Quiet or not?

[Steve Lamb]

Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 23:12 -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
>> Mario Vukelic wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 22:54 -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
>>>> "Confused" users either learn to ignore it or learn to read it. 
>>> No, they stay away if given the choice, and turn to systems that are
>>> perceived as friendlier.
>>     Really?  So where'd we come from?

> Huh?

    *sigh*  Come now.  Do you honestly think that we, as in the people on this
list discussing this topic, didn't have a choice so we were forced into
Ubuntu?  Or that we were born with the knowledge of Linux?  Mmmm, cool idea
but, no.

    Where did we come from?  We are people who were confused, faced that
choice, and we either learned to ignore it or learned to read it.  The very
existence of this list and this conversation negates your premise.  For if we
all did as you said, went to systems that are perceived as friendlier (because
I assert that we do have choices, we all chose to be here) then we would not
be having this conversation on this topic.

> Huh? What's not possible? Changing menu.lst? Use ssh. And anyway,

    On a machine that's crashed and not on the network.  Are y'daft, man!?


> showing a message when there is a need to and else staying quiet is a
> property that is completely unrelated to whether the system is remote or
> not.

    Showing the messages when it is critical to do so is a property of good
diagnostics and good "UI" if you insist on calling the interface prior to
where a user accesses it "user interface".  :P  I'll just coin the term SI for
"SysAdmin Interface".  SI != UI.