The beastie boot menu.

[Jason C. Wells]

--On Monday, November 29, 2004 6:14 PM +0100 Rahul Siddharthan 
<rsidd at online.fr> wrote:

> Quoting Adam Fabian <afabian at austin.rr.com>:
>> Was reading the CVS all list, and it's gone.  I, for one, kind of
>> liked it.  It was a bit of a shock the first time, comparing with 4.x,
>> but it didn't take long to get used to it, and it's kind of useful.
>
> It's very useful.  And it lives on in Dragonfly, with different ascii art.
>
> More evidence that FreeBSD is losing all touch with regular users.

What is a regular user?  I use FreeBSD quite regularly.  I am a regular guy 
and I use FreeBSD.  Using FreeBSD keeps me, he-hem, regular.  I will assume 
I am qualified to comment, as a regular user.

The beastie menu is just another level of complexity.  It has very little 
to do with anything.  I had to learn about Forth in order to figure out how 
to turn it off.  Learning about Forth is not something I wanted to do. 
Forth is hardly a regular user sort of thing.  Sure, once I dilly dallied 
in the docs, I figured out what was going on.  It did take time.

"Regular user" as the term may be applied to FreeBSD and the user community 
has a vastly different meaning than regular user in other computing 
circles.  The absence of the boot menu is substantially more regular to 
FreeBSD in my opinion than its presence.  FreeBSD is not the operating 
system where cutesy is valued.

As far as Matt Dillon goes, he is a big boy now.  He is more than capable 
of coding what ever it is he wants to code.  Dragonfly's direction is 
substantially different from FreeBSD.  Matt is free to do as he pleases.  I 
dare say that even with a present boot menu, that Dragonfly is not for 
regular users.  It is for extraordinary users.  That doesn't mean its 
better or worse.  Its just different.  Of the things I read about 
Dragonfly, user friendliness is not one of the things I recall as being a 
design goal.