On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 10:00 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III <ti...@math.uh.edu> wrote: >>>>>> "JK" == Jan Kurik <jku...@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 _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/LI5AXFGEEPU3RQRRXCNQMCMUBBWHPTM3/
