Vanessa's Domain

Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.

Before I go into the weeds with this one, let me start out by saying I’m not i one of those haters who dislike system.d as a whole. In general I find it a useful piece of kit unix philosophy be damned. I’m even in favor of the move they’re making in terms of user directories becoming portable files so long as it’s done elegantly and doesn’t break anything.

That being said, in recent news the system.d project is implementing a function to display a blue screen of death message during a boot error.

I think this is a bad move, but not for the knee jerk reasons many may have towards it. The thing is, we already had an answer to this; kernel panic. What we need is not to just ape the Windows solution but simply improve the existing solution. Have a kernel panic or boot error crash down to a terminal output and display all the debug information that way as part of the terminal output. If it’s lower level than bash, then just display a simulated one, like GRUB has. It’s more in line with how Linux behaves in general based on established norms. Since Linux users are used to getting debug information from the terminal, not via full screen messages with a blue background, keep in spirit of what we already know. If I didn’t know about this change and got hit by one of these things, I’d assume it was a virus or some sort of rootkit before I’d ever think it was a legitimate Linux output message. It just doesn’t match the way things are handled in our neck of the woods. We’re not Microsoft. We’re not Windows. We should never try to be. You can take lessons from it all day long but you should never just effectively copy and paste them like this. You should go “hmmm that’s a useful feature. How can I adapt the mechanics we already have to include that kind of feature for our system without breaking our established behavior of software and blindsiding front line techs with a sudden and uncharacteristic change of this magnitude?” Then do that.

Also ditch the QR code and just display whatever it would say along with the message.

Love is the law, love under will.

Hopefully,
Vanessa