> Personally, I very much like the detailed and informative POST screens that older PCs default to, and indeed the whole audiovisual experience[1] of the boot process.
I was having some issue, that I can't recall, a while ago on my iMac. So, I turned on the "verbose boot", which dumps the messages as the OS is starting up. I can't say what's POST and what's not. I think these messages are, umm, post POST.
But, here's the experience.
First it starts with an, essentially, 80x24 window with a 12pt font in the middle of the screen. Quickly, that screen vanishes, and the text shrinks down to at least 1/2 of that size (or, perhaps its still a 12 point font, but now it's on a 5K screen, and not scaled). The tiny text scrolls along on a drive in theater size screen, essentially, for me, unreadable due to both size, speed, and volume. It's not quite "Matrix" indecipherable, but it's close.
Since it doesn't outright fail with a message stuck saying "here's where it broke", the display is, honestly, not particularly useful.
I can see if the crisis is so bad that if it does, indeed, just stop and stick on some very interesting line, then it may be useful. But as a waterfall of messages, it wasn't helpful with my problem, and I'm betting, for many, it's likely not helpful to them either.
In the end, all of these messages are logged and better viewed at your leisure after booting, again, assuming you get that far. But even if it did fail, it's such small text, my fear is that the it would print something out, go "oh that's bad" and restart before you could even make sense of it.
A modern OS is spectacularly complicated, necessitating a very messy boot process. It does not surprise me that anyone would want to hide that.
I was having some issue, that I can't recall, a while ago on my iMac. So, I turned on the "verbose boot", which dumps the messages as the OS is starting up. I can't say what's POST and what's not. I think these messages are, umm, post POST.
But, here's the experience.
First it starts with an, essentially, 80x24 window with a 12pt font in the middle of the screen. Quickly, that screen vanishes, and the text shrinks down to at least 1/2 of that size (or, perhaps its still a 12 point font, but now it's on a 5K screen, and not scaled). The tiny text scrolls along on a drive in theater size screen, essentially, for me, unreadable due to both size, speed, and volume. It's not quite "Matrix" indecipherable, but it's close.
Since it doesn't outright fail with a message stuck saying "here's where it broke", the display is, honestly, not particularly useful.
I can see if the crisis is so bad that if it does, indeed, just stop and stick on some very interesting line, then it may be useful. But as a waterfall of messages, it wasn't helpful with my problem, and I'm betting, for many, it's likely not helpful to them either.
In the end, all of these messages are logged and better viewed at your leisure after booting, again, assuming you get that far. But even if it did fail, it's such small text, my fear is that the it would print something out, go "oh that's bad" and restart before you could even make sense of it.
A modern OS is spectacularly complicated, necessitating a very messy boot process. It does not surprise me that anyone would want to hide that.