idea for Fedora boot screen

[Ray Strode]

Hi,

> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 5:59 PM, Michael Langlie <mlanglie at redhat.com> wrote:
> > Here are a couple animated GIFs (forgive the glow banding near the end) demonstrating ideas for a general/non-themed Fedora boot screen. They use the logo icon as a progress indicator before being applied as branding.
> >
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Image:Fedora_boot_animation_01.gif
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Image:Fedora_boot_animation_02.gif
> 
> These look great.  I love this simplicity and elegance.  And I think
> it looks even better than I expected without the Fedora text.
I think this looks really good, too.  I like the idea of a minimally themed or unthemed splash that we can standardize on.
It means we can

1) provide a consistent look at boot time from release to release
2) take the time to polish and evolve one idea

> This also gives us a reasonable target for how quickly we should boot.
>  My view is that the current trend of highly decorative and themed
> boot splashes is an artifact of our failure to improve boot times.  We
> should be designing for the case where boot is fairly quick and the
> boot screens are merely a brief transition to GDM (only necessary
> since it will be longer than 2 seconds even in the best case).  Having
> it be a distinct and highly decorative stage in the boot process
> detracts from the overall experience from power-on to desktop.
> 
> Also, moving away from a traditional progress bar is a good thing,
I don't disagree in the mid-to-long run, but realistically people are going to be stuck with 45 - 75 second boots for F11 like they were with F10 and earlier.

I feel like while that animation looks really good at the speed shown in the mock up, it won't feel quite right on the vast majority of machines that slow boot times.  Unfortunately, I really do think we need a separate progress bar for now.

Given we're stuck with slow boot times, I'd propose for F11 we do one of:

1) do the proposed animation in a loop while booting and have a nice looking separate progress bar that's lifetime is the entire boot process
or
2) do the proposed animation at the same speed as the mock up at the very tail end of the boot process (the last 10 seconds or whatever) and do a progess bar up until that point.  

If we know ahead of time that boot up will be fast (remember we record the last boot duration and load it at boot up), then we can just omit the progress bar steps. That way, those users with fast SSD drives or whatever get the best experience even now, and users with slow boot up get an okay experience now and the best experience later when we actually fix boot time.

--Ray