Hiding the Fedora boot menu

The venerable Linux boot menu has made its appearance at boot time since the days when LILO was the standard boot loader, through the days of GRUB, and onward to today's GRUB 2 and others. It is sometimes configured out by distributions as something that will potentially confuse less-technical users, but it has been a mainstay of Fedora for many releases. A recent proposal to hide the menu, starting in Fedora 29, has met a mixed reaction, but those who are not in favor are also those most able to revert to the existing behavior.

Hans de Goede raised the issue back at the end of May. He suggested that Fedora had at one time hidden the boot menu, but changed. As a longtime Fedora user, I don't remember that switch, but my memory is faulty and that may be the case here. In any case, De Goede's idea is to not have the distribution print any confusing messages at boot time: "the end goal being a user pressing the on button and then going to the graphical login manager without him seeing any text messages / menus filled with technical jargon."

The response was somewhat mixed, as might be expected. Stephen Gallagher was concerned about boots that failed and gave the user no alternatives to try. De Goede said that the plan was to detect failed boots and then show the boot menu on the next boot. He muddied the waters somewhat by mentioning a "fastboot" feature that he is planning for Fedora 30. It would effectively provide no way for a user sitting at the console to override the boot sequence (with a key press, say) and get the boot menu once the system has started booting.

It should be noted that De Goede is only suggesting changing the default; users can reconfigure their systems to always display the menu by changing the GRUB configuration. In addition, he is only proposing this change for installations with a single operating system—multi-boot systems clearly need a way to choose which is to be booted.

Another concern, at least for Fedora 29, is how a user can bring up the boot menu if they decide they need or want to. De Goede plans to provide a "reboot_with_menu" kind of command, but that requires a running system. Currently, using the "escape" (ESC) key or F8 during boot are used for that purpose but several thought those were too "magical" and would likely need to be searched for on the web at the time when the system may not be booting at all. As Gerald B. Cox put it:

Nicolas Mailhot echoed some of that; he wants to make sure there are clear ways to make the boot menu appear when needed and that it is all documented clearly:

There had been enough feedback a day after his original post that De Goede posted a summary of what he had gotten from the discussion. He said that users would be able to get the boot menu via F8 (or ESC on some systems where the firmware has grabbed F8), for Fedora 29. The boot menu would automatically be shown if the previous boot failed or the system did not shut down cleanly. Determining what constitutes a failed boot needs to be determined:

But some were less than pleased with the idea that users would have to press a certain key at a particular time. Andrew Lutomirski asked: "Can we at least let users hold down a key rather than having to press it at the correct magic time?" In a separate (but closely related) thread, De Goede said that he had been able to figure out how to make it so that users could simply hold down the shift key during boot to get the menu.

John Florian wondered if Fedora has enough of a non-technical audience to even consider this change. He pointed out that even those who can change back to the existing behavior can only do so once the system has been installed and booted successfully. He worried about hiding needed information and suggested being more conservative about when to do so:

How many non-technical Fedora users there are is immaterial, Jason L. Tibbitts III said. If users are technical, they should be able to consult the Fedora documentation to find out how to get the level of information they want at boot time.

But Florian is unimpressed with the whole idea: "I sit in front of computer to do work, not be entertained by pretty things, especially the lowly boot process. That's like bragging about how cool the spark plugs look in your new car." Beyond just the car analogy, he raises the issue of failing installs again, as well. Changing the default is not possible "when fighting a borked system where the install fails".

Adam Williamson had a much more prosaic complaint: "We (QA) would like to note that the 'How to test' section of this Change seems heavily under-developed". He noted a number of things missing, which De Goede acknowledged; he updated the wiki page to address them. He has also promised more documentation. which will live in the system administrator's guide for Fedora 29 (and beyond) as well as having a mention and link in the release notes.

While there are some reasonable concerns about all of this, the proposal has the look of something that is likely to get adopted. Finding ways to address the concern about failing installs would likely take care of the last substantive technical problem that has been brought up. The change is distasteful to some, but that's largely aesthetics—it can easily be switched back once the system can boot.

There is still the lingering question of whether a change like this is truly needed—are there really non-technical users that are getting put off with Fedora because they see some technical jargon at boot time? Clearly the "other" operating systems have this feature, which makes it attractive to follow along, at least to some. It is hard to imagine that newbies will flock to Fedora once it is in place, but maybe it will slowly and steadily help bring in more users—only time will tell.