Boot screen: Quiet or not?

[Steve Lamb]

Ari Torhamo wrote:
> 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. 

     Maybe so.  But we're talking about uninformed people here.  Would they 
feel the same way if they knew just the simplest of information about what's 
happening.  "The machine is showing diagnostic messages in case something 
fails.  Normally nothing does so just let it go."

     I don't want to resort to the car analogy but Mario went there first when 
he said the car's UI only told him about a problem when a problem was 
occuring.  What's the first thing a modern car does when you turn on the 
ignition.  It tells you that the engine failed, the water and oil are 
overheating and who knows what else is going wrong *right now*.  Then the 
self-check on the indicator lights is over and they go out.

     Same thing.

     Yet in all the time that cars do this I don't think anyone would say that 
the confusion of the uneducated driver should have sway on whether that test 
is performed.  It is a necessary diagnostic function not for the every-day 
driver who is unwilling to learn how to perform maintenance on his car (and I 
am one, I admit) but it is there for the people who actually perform the 
maintenance.  The every-day driver simply learned that it wasn't worth concern 
unless a light didn't go out after the engine was started or if a light came 
on after the initial test period.

     The boot scroll performs the same function and I have absolutely no 
doubts that the very same people, once informed that it is diagnostic in 
nature and a good thing, would just as easily and just as happily ignore the 
scroll and not feel any more threatened by it than they do their car's 
diagnostic checks.


> 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.

     Criticize, maybe.  Ask what it is to be informed, no.

-- 
          Steve C. Lamb         | But who decides what they dream?
        PGP Key: 1FC01004       |   And dream I do...
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