On 03/13/2013 02:23 PM, Ian Malone wrote:
On 13 March 2013 12:46, Máirín Duffy <duffy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 03/13/2013 12:26 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
- (Nobody explicitly stated this, but) Displaying information geared
towards power users by default is intimidating / confusing to
less-knowledgeable users."
I'd call this to be an urban legend. A boot menu is self-explanatory,
even to new-comers.
It may baffle them when they see it for the first time, but will very
soon get used to it.
No, a boot menu is not self-explanatory, and no, this is not an 'urban
legend.' How do you even come up with associating the term 'urban
legend' to statement saying that a complex screen is confusing to casual
computer users?
20 years+ of experience with Linux and more with other OSes :-)
I have taught multiple classes of teenage and pre-teen students using
Fedora Live USB keys. This necessarily involves having to guide them
through using syslinux (which is very similar in appearance to grub) to
boot their system, I can say from actual experience that:
1) The boot menu was not self-explanatory, and the students had a lot of
questions about what stuff on the screen meant.
And how did it impact their usage experience? I guess, their reaction
was a "Wazat?", temporary "raising the eyebrow", but then they simply
went on.
Actually, I would expect your students to have more issues with
understanding "keyboard layout" selection, "timezones" selection,
explaining "hw-clock", the concepts behind "updates"/rpm-conflicts and
so on and would consider the bootloader prompt to have been one
(ignorable) detail amongst many other much huger problem.
One experiment I did: I sat some relatives and friends (no computer
iliterates) in front of Gnome3 and asked them to work with it. All of
threw it away in disgust.
Then you have good students.
I am having doubts any pre-teen and only some teens are able to
run/configure any OS and them to be overwhelmed all over the place
without supervison/prior instructions. Once they have been instructed,
they likely are able work with it.
Are teens and pre-teens fedora's main
target audience now?
I hope not ... I am not interested in converting Fedora or Linux into a toy.
Ralf
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