John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > On 3/18/20 9:58 AM, Holger Wansing wrote: >> while investigating a grub installation failure, I came across the main menu >> entry of grub-installer: >> "Install the GRUB boot loader on a hard disk" >> >> This is no longer optimal, since we have flash/SSD drives, SD cards etc. >> where >> OS'es are installed on. >> >> So this should be changed, similar to the "rename 'CD/CD-ROM' into >> 'installation media' approach". > > According to that logic you would have to replace the save icon in every > desktop application because we're no longer using floppy disks.
As far as I'm aware, that persists because there's no obvious better option; if one ever turns up, I certainly hope that developers will switch over to it. Not that I think "storage medium" is much of an improvement in this case. > The majority of all users is able to perform the cognitive process to > that "hard disk" means "installation device" and "storage medium" here > is very confusing since that normally refers to a data disk and not > the system disk. The trouble with "hard disk" is that it refers to one particular kind of hardware, and users have no reason to expect debian-installer to be using the kind of metaphorical language that requires a special cognitive leap in the first place; so how are they going to know that it will in fact work on an SSD? I don't know what I'd suggest instead, but possibilities include: "Install the GRUB boot loader to hardware" "Install the GRUB boot loader on this system" "Install the GRUB boot loader on the system disk" "Install the GRUB boot loader to disk" "Install the GRUB boot loader to a non-volatile storage device" (As it happens I've never much liked "install" here, either; usually an "install" on Debian means something like "apt install grub2" (which installs a grub boot loader package on my system). What I'm doing here is directly overwriting my boot sector with the GRUB boot loader code. But to get anywhere with this nitpick I'd probably need to persuade the GRUB developers, which seems unlikely.) > When are we going to replace "REWIND", "PAUSE", F. FWD", "PLAY" and > "RECORD" on playback devices since we are no longer dealing with tapes > and "re-cording" and "re-winding" does not actually reflect anymore > what's happening? "Record" and "cord" are etymologically unconnected, so the only dead metaphor in that list is "REWIND" - and why use that when you could use the self-explanatory standard ideogram "⏪"? (Mind you, when I was first using a GNU/Linux desktop back in the nineties it took me *ages* to discover that the only way of getting a simple volume control knob was to pretend I was a professional DJ and search for a "mixer" application. Nobody *starts* as an expert!) -- JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package