On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 10:00 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III
<tibbs(a)math.uh.edu> wrote:
>>>>> "JK" == Jan Kurik
<jkurik(a)redhat.com> writes:
JK> 1. Add patches to grub to also make pressing F8 show the menu
One thing I've never really understood is the reason for using such a
small set of keys to interrupt the boot process. I seem to recall that
in older versions (perhaps pre-grub2) the space bar or the cursor keys
worked. I also recall at some point that you could just hold down the
shift key. More recently I actually thought something was broken
because I simply couldn't find the magic key (only later finding out
that it had at some point been limited to just 'Esc').
I think it's to avoid ambiguity. F8 on one of my computers tells the
firmware to do a firmware update or some such thing, so I'm going to
press F8 and maybe get a firmware update menu, or maybe I'll get a
GRUB menu, depending on my timing. And I think such ambiguity will
inevitably lead to bad UI/UX.
I have wondered why UEFI never got around to standardizing firmware
keyboard shortcuts, or whether the OEM firmware vendors actively
lobbied to not standardize.
This is one of those areas were Apple's UX is vastly superior, the
keyboard shortcuts for firmware and bootloader have been standardized
for a very long time - at least 20 years, across multiple archs and
hardware generations and development teams.
If we're going to patch grub to expand the set of keys it will
watch
for, is it possible to just expand the set to encompass all keys? We
don't really need to make it that hard to find the grub menu, do we?
I think it needs to be made specific, unambiguous, and deliberate. Yes
this means it is also obscure if you don't know the decoder ring, but
worse is when the decoder ring is either random or changing all the
time. But for that we get to thank companies that somehow find
standardization in this area to be unimportant or offensive - I'm not
really sure where they're at with it but they can literally do
anything they want and yet they aren't doing this.
--
Chris Murphy