On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 12:03, Havoc Pennington wrote:
On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 01:29:52PM -0400, Thomas Corriher wrote:
> Benjamin Vander was correct. It is the graphical booting which is
> more likely to cause boot problems, or allow serious problems to go
> unnoticed during the boot process. It is a bad design decision
> from a technical perspective. However, it is good marketing and
> seems more welcoming to newbies.
It is not a marketing decision - the boot messages do show up as a
real usability problem, and usability is one of the primary objectives
of Red Hat Linux. It is one of our main technical goals.
When something is a usability plus for nontechnical users and a
usability minus for technical users, we're always going to default
to the nontechnical setting, because technical users have the skills
to "opt out" and change the default.
This decision is what pisses many of us off to no end. The problem
really comes into play on a matter of scale. When I have to unsimplify
it on the tenth machine or for the hundredth time it gets frustrating.
The problem is made even more frustrating any time the
"user-friendliness" has a bug in it.