Black Screen of Death
Some Linux users like to poke fun at Windows users with respect to the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Despite the fact that although common for many years rarely happens with more recent versions of Windows.
Yet Linux users suffer this same problem. The notable difference is the screen is black and there is no feedback text to inform users how to resolve the problem.
Ha, ha. Not so funny.
Surf the web for solutions and invariably one will discover that adding the nomodeset boot option will solve the problem. Yes, user are expected to manually edit a boot loader config file.
Then users are expected to manually edit files to add esoteric commands such as FRAMEBUFFER=y, uvesafb mode_option=1024x768-24 mtrr=3 scroll=ywrap, and intel_agp, drm, i915 modeset=1 and then, yes, reboot multiple times to test these changes.
During all of this debugging and troubleshooting users are supposed to roll over and wet themselves because doing this kind of thing is so cool and powerful.
Does anybody seriously expect non technical users to tolerate such silliness?
The nomodeset boot option covers a scab and never fixes the disease.
How about reboot and just use Windows?
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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