Fedora 29 Might Hide The GRUB Boot Menu & It's Causing Lots Of Debate

[waxhead]

Dumbing things down makes OEMs happy. They don't want to deal with the support, less chance of someone bricking their laptop, the better. Most people want that it "just works". The people that care about ME etc aren't most people.

"Just works" can't be said for any Linux distro. If you need a system to revert back to old kernel versions at boot, you're not doing "just works". e.g. Windows will reverse upgrades if an update bricks it.

Well I would have a hard time to agree that Windows "just works" and (successfully) reverse upgrades that brick it. If you consider reinstalling from scratch , then sure - Windows "just" works

[xiando]

There are also a lot of people that belive patatoes grow on trees. What does your and your quoted "people don't know anything" argument tell us? Exactly! They want Windows!

This makes me think of a strange paradox too many ignore: People don't choose to switch to GNU/Linux because it's easier to use than Windows, they do it because it gives them the freedom to explore and customize. GNOME and the way GNOME developers are hell-bent on removing features to "make it more user-friendly" may have the goal of making it attractive to people who use Windows - but guess what, they ain't going to switch. There's no point in alienating the 1% of computer users who've already switched to GNU/Linux because it's not like Windows. If you can't figure out how to enable or disable grub's boot menu then you're probably not the kind of person who's using GNU/Linux in the first place. Those who just want to play games are more likely to buy a playstation than switching to Fedora because it removed the grub boot menu "to make it more friendly".

[Britoid]

Why do people want defaults that prevents you from having any clue about what is going on?! How do you expect people to be curious and learn that perhaps there is such a thing like kernel parameters that can to interesting things.

This way of dumbing down people is the very reason things such as Windows 10 (hint: the default "privacy" policy) and the Intel management engine is accepted by the majority of people anyway.

If you choose to have no clue about what is going on and happily embrace stupidity then by all means go ahead, but keep in mind that smart people is vastly outnumbered.

Dumbing things down makes OEMs happy. They don't want to deal with the support, less chance of someone bricking their laptop, the better. Most people want that it "just works". The people that care about ME etc aren't most people.

"Just works" can't be said for any Linux distro. If you need a system to revert back to old kernel versions at boot, you're not doing "just works". e.g. Windows will reverse upgrades if an update bricks it.

[gbcox]

It's pretty easy to change grub's configuration on Fedora, just edit /etc/default/grub and add any special OS in /etc/grub.d/ if you need to and run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

People who don't know what grub or a kernel is are obviously not going to do this or figure out how to do it.

My point was that "grub2-mkconfig" was left out... if you're going to change the defaults, take a few moments to document how to return to the previous state. It's not simply a matter of editing one file. There are other things that need to be done.

[Anvil]

How about we keep it but have it not be so terribly ugly? A UI matching the login theme would sweeten the deal and keep users in control.

A text-mode list of cryptic numbers is not the most welcoming way to start one's day. There's good support for graphic modes in UEFI, why not use it?

Fedora Devs will Never Polish the Grub Menu like it is in Redhat . all of Fedora is Vanilla, , IMO Fedora will not be a Huge success, but if i was still using Fedora i would be against Hiding the Grub Menu.

[xorbe]

Show me the GRUB boot menu.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

[waxhead]

Why do people want defaults that prevents you from having any clue about what is going on?! How do you expect people to be curious and learn that perhaps there is such a thing like kernel parameters that can to interesting things.

This way of dumbing down people is the very reason things such as Windows 10 (hint: the default "privacy" policy) and the Intel management engine is accepted by the majority of people anyway.

If you choose to have no clue about what is going on and happily embrace stupidity then by all means go ahead, but keep in mind that smart people is vastly outnumbered.

[Candy]

While we are at it and one of the initiatiors of this idea is obviously reading phoronix...

... we use a customized grub entry that we select to restore the workstation to a new state (hotswapping old with new). As long as we are able to "easily" access grub again - within a reasonable amount of time (say 2-3 seconds for pressing a key after bootup) - and be able to go to the selector, then you can hide everything. But make sure we can access the menu somehow ...

[Candy]

A lot of computer users don't even know what a web browser is (even someone my own age, which is <30, told me today that she had no idea what web browsers were!), so I highly doubt they know what a kernel is.

There are also a lot of people that belive patatoes grow on trees. What does your and your quoted "people don't know anything" argument tell us? Exactly! They want Windows!

[Sniperfox47]

I look forward to when efistubs/efibootloaders are default. Additionally, GRUB ruins the framebuffer on EFI systems, again something that Windows does well.

I don't think we're going to see this any time soon. The EFI stub loader is great but it's not without it's problems. There are a number of machines out there that will only load from the fallback bootloader (BOOTX64.EFI) or Microsoft's bootloader. That don't allow adding additional boot entries even manually.

My EVGA board was like this until a recent UEFI update. It would look for the windows bootloader on a drive, and upon failing to find that would load the fallback bootloader, but it didn't have any options to add another manually, and if you tried with efibootmgr from inside Linux it would forget the changes after you reboot.