Why all the fancy ASCII art in the boot loader?

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 27 Feb 2015 01:50:57 +0000, opendaddy at hushmail.com wrote:
> That is all good, however, why does this stuff have to be there
> in the first place?

FreeBSD has some tradition in combining a dialog-based boot
selection (with or without ACPI, into single-user mode, and
so on) with ASCII art. The advantage is that it will show on
serial lines or servers fine - most of them don't even have
a graphics card or a monitor attached so fancy 3D graphics
with HD sound effects would be useless.

After all, it depends a lot on individual preference if this
ASCII art makes the system more or less appealing to you, or
if you're able to ignore it altogether. Many people believe
in judging an operating system's quality from the colorfulness
of the splash screen, the boot loader, or the installer; in
their opinion, FreeBSD must be total crap. ;-)



> Just seems a bit unprofessional that's all.

As I said, it's easy to disable it if you don't like it. I
would not say it's unprofessional, but it might be a valid
opinion to say it's a bad default choice.

However, FreeBSD _gives_ you the ability to make a choice
how you want your boot prompt, splash screen, X login,
desktop environment and applications. This, in my opinion,
makes it _very_ professional compared to systems that force
a given set of settings upon the user, and there is no way
to make a different choice.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...