idea for Fedora boot screen

[William Jon McCann]

Hey Mike,

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 I prefer the first slightly more than the second because the
second puts too much emphasis on the infinity symbol.

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, in
my opinion.  For what its worth, Windows 7 seems to be headed in this
direction as well:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/18/engineering-the-windows-7-boot-animation.aspx

Anyway, I think this is clearly a step in the right direction.
Perhaps some of the talented artists on this list can further refine
these ideas.  But even as they are I think this is an excellent
candidate for the default F11 boot splash.

Jon

PS.  It is pretty exciting that in F11 we will have
graphical/quiet/smooth/elegant boot on all major platforms for the
first time ever.  Before any other open source software distribution!
As such I think it pays to think carefully about how we present this.