Boot screen: Quiet or not?

[Bart Silverstrim]

Ari Torhamo wrote:
> 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.

People don't like to feel stupid.  Simple statement, yet I don't think 
"computer people" quite understand this facet of their users.  They will 
do stupid things in the quest to avoid looking stupid.  Many users I 
deal with will keep quiet unless they must ask a question because 
otherwise they feel silly asking questions.

Nine times out of ten they just want to get a particular job done.  How 
it happens, they don't care.

> 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.

This approach was novel, for me, for the first two years when I had to 
repair systems and help support people.  Now it gets to be a source of 
frustration since I have to translate what they're talking about into 
what is actually happening.

Doing this day in and day out helps increase your stress levels 
considerably if you let it get to you or lose perspective.  But your 
approach, observing instead of directly guiding, is exactly the kind of 
thing the OP would be referring to in creating a user-friendly interface 
or application.

The conflict for me is that these people don't want to take time to be 
our social experiment. They want a fix so they can get their work done, 
sooner than later.  It's like having an application act up that, given 
time, we could fix once we untangle the problem...or we could simply 
take an hour to uninstall and reinstall, never knowing the true cause of 
the problem.

> 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. 

Who are the people you're observing that actually used DOS?  Windows has 
been around for what, fifteen years now?

And if asked about it, is it really a problem for them?  Or are there 
more pressing concerns?

>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.

I could hazard a guess that it wasn't an issue.  If it irritated them it 
was something so small that it was ignored once the computer reached an 
interactive state...where they could get their work done.

It's like Mazlow's hierarchy of needs.  The part where you twiddle your 
thumbs for two minutes isn't as important as the part where you know how 
to type your memos.

> 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.

Or another possibility is that it isn't severe enough to care about as 
anything more than a passing irritation.  Or they just ignore it.  How 
much attention do users pay to EULAs, one of the most annoying parts of 
software installations?  Compare that to entering the seventy-digit key 
code.  THAT increases blood pressure more.  In my own observations, 
users will happily sit and click click click click click through an 
installer without the vaguest clue what they just clicked on or what 
it's doing.

These are just my own observations.  I wasn't flaming the OP, contrary 
to what he may have thought.  I was just smoldering and nowhere near 
flames.  This thread was picking a nit when I'm dealing with people that 
have far bigger issues with their systems than how pretty the bootup 
process looks, and quite frankly, I want to see as little of it as 
possible in the first place.  I need my systems to stay up.

I understand usability.  I'm all for friendliness of user interface. 
But c'mon...Linux has it's roots in the server room, and the audience 
consists largely of hackers, sysadmins, and people who aren't spending 
the majority of their time playing games with their Linux systems, and 
for those people, what makes a system end-user friendly isn't what 
necessarily what makes it friendly for us, just like car enthusiasts 
sneer at people who don't drive manual transmissions.  User friendly 
cars do as much of the work for us, with GPS, computer controlled 
transmissions and suspension and sound enhancements and phone and stereo 
integration, etc. etc...enthusiasts want to keep one hand in the engine, 
so to speak.

Ubuntu's mission is to bring Linux to Joe End User.  That's not the goal 
of "Linux."  Let's fix usability issues with what we use every day 
before we worry about making an issue of the bootup animation, that's 
all I'm saying.