Boot screen: Quiet or not?

[Ari Torhamo]

ke, 2007-10-10 kello 09:56 -0400, Bart Silverstrim kirjoitti:
> Mario Vukelic wrote:
> > On Tue, 2007-10-09 at 22:33 -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote:

> > 
> > What's YOUR problem? Look, I personally don't care for these messages,
> > but if they are there I don't care either, they are just not as exciting
> > anymore as they were 11 years ago when I booted my first Slackware. If
> > watched disks being mounted thousands of times, so what. 
> > If something goes wrong, please tell me. But otherwise a faster, not
> > distracting boot is worth more to me.
> > 
> > But the whole discussion is not about expert users (who can change a
> > one-liner in menu.lst), but about non-experts. And I do think that the
> > boot splash is preferable for them.
> 
> All I see is you complaining, though.
> 
> File it as a report at Canonical.  Create a fix to submit.  Find a large 
>   number of people who are quizzically staring at their systems worrying 
> it's not working right because of the bootup messages and have them join 
> into the chorus of complaints until someone else fixes it.
> 
> And I think the real heart of the messages is what you just said.  "I 
> don't care for these messages".  Non-experts don't care.  They just want 
> to send email, surf porn, and write a report once in awhile.


I have converted a few people to use Ubuntu on their computers. There
are also a few of those to whom I have introduced it, but who have
chosen not to become users. This has made me curious about how people
really feel about Ubuntu when they see and use it for the first time.

One thing that I noticed is that if you express your enthusiasm about
the OS, people don't easily say anything negative about it (I'm not
talking about fans of other operating systems here :-) Also if you act
like an expert who knows what's important and what's not, people may
keep their criticism to themselves.

I begun to observe people more, instead of just telling them what to do.
I did this to be able to get their genuine reaction to things they see
and experience. If I noticed that something confused or worried them, I
tried to let them describe the situation, the problem, from their point
of view.

I have learned many things from this approach, but one of interest here
is that the boot messages are typically concidered to be (to varying
extent) unmodern, unpolished and unfriendly. To many it brings back the
memory of DOS, which obviously isn't a good thing. It's noteworthy that
none of those who felt that way, said anything about it unpromted. When
I saw from their face that they were looking at something that confused
them, or made them feel uncomfortable, I asked "how do you feel about
what you are seeing on the screen right now?", or something like that.
People don't easily criticize something they know nothing about. They
just lack the words to describe it. Or they may think that it is
something that comes with the package and can't be changed, so it would
be silly to criticize it.


Regards,

Ari Torhamo