Idea #8679: Make recovery mode selection a little less obvious

Written by aysiu the 16 May 08 at 16:56. Category: System.
Related to: Nothing/Others. Status: New

Description

Right now, the boot menu has regular Ubuntu, recovery mode, and memtest. With just a simple Down arrow, someone can accidentally boot into recovery mode.

Perhaps we should make recovery mode a little less obvious. Is there some way to make a special key combination or something to access recovery mode? Mac OS X has you hold down Cmd-S during bootup to boot into single-user mode. I'm not sure if Grub can do this, but it'd be cool if it could.

The reasoning behind this is more user-friendliness. Users who aren't comfortable at the command prompt might accidentally end up there and not know what to do.

The added benefit is that those who need the illusion of better security would also stop complaining that the existence of recovery mode is a security problem.

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mihai007 wrote on the 16 May 08 at 22:43

"The added benefit is that those who need the illusion of better security would also stop complaining that the existence of recovery mode is a security problem"

In my opinion there is nothing worse than having an illusion of security when in fact there isn't.

I think it would be better not to hide this menu but to ask for confirmation that this is the user's real intention.

korvins wrote on the 2 Aug 08 at 12:10

What are talking about mihai007?

Usability says that the actions that are done most of the times must be much easier to access. In this way the last kernel, without any option should be easier to hit than any recover mode or old kernel.

You should be able to access recovery menu only by pressing supr or any key that it is indicated in grub.

The list from grub is growing and it is really scary. And useless in 95% of the cases. You should hide it.

Big +1 for this idea.

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