Re: Summary of shared EFI system partition discussion

On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 12:24 PM, Máirín Duffy <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Chris,
>
> On 10/15/2015 02:12 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>
>> The real "problem" here, is the user who has always
>> been, and forever will be, ignorant of bootloader blocks. There is no
>> amount of education or documentation or oops I can't boot my computer
>> experiences, that will change that so we need to give up on the idea of
>> trying to make users better than they are and just let them get on with
>> why they're installing Fedora in the first place.
>>
>
> To be fair - many of the users who are ignorant of bootloader blocks are
> also ignorant of why they'd want to go beyond the default FS / partition
> layout choices and wouldn't end up in custom partitioning anyway.


I see no such correlation. I routinely see users who only have ever used
custom partitioning (not just Anaconda, but other distro installers as
well) have no idea what firmware their computer has, why that matters, how
it affects what partition scheme is used, what partitions are created, the
fact that grub2-install no longer applies, myriad changes that are thrust
upon the user as a result of not so much the UEFI spec but because of this
very weird (to me) installer idea that users need to see all partitions
just because that's they way it's always been.

And by so doing, they are now getting into trouble in ways they never
previously got into trouble. And in ways they don't get into trouble with
other OS partitioning tools that don't show them the whole story.



> This issue does not affect guided storage path nor the reclaim disk space
> dialog.
>
>
This issue does not affect custom partitioning with MBR gaps either. That
is, it doesn't happen on BIOS+MBR systems. The user cannot delete the
Windows bootloader even in custom partitioning on such systems. They
literally can't get into trouble.

Replicate that behavior, is what I'm suggesting, rather than falling into
this trap of showing partitions for the sake of showing partitions, when
doing so does not aid user success.

The consequence of showing them such things is that we're effectively
telling users for the first time in free software OS installer history they
need to understand how Windows boots. They never had to understand the
Windows bootloader esoterics before, but now they do, in order to avoid
trouble in custom partitioning. And that's not a ding on just Anaconda, all
the other distributions do this too by exposing these bootloader structures
to the user. And confusion ensues.

The appropriate thing to do for all users is totally abstract bootloader
blocks, however they manifest, and just manage it for them correctly. It's
the only way to be sure. Leave the user out of it, they're not reliable.

-- 
Chris Murphy

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