Fedora 29 Might Hide The GRUB Boot Menu & It's Causing Lots Of Debate

A feature proposal for Fedora 29 would hide the GRUB boot menu by default on installations where Fedora is the only installed operating system. Surprisingly this has spun into a lot of discussion and debate over the matter.

Red Hat's Hans de Goede is working on making he GRUB menu hidden by default on Fedora in order to improve the boot experience -- just as Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have been doing for years. On systems with multiple operating systems, the GRUB boot-loader menu would still be shown by default.

When hidden, like with other distributions, the GRUB menu can be still displayed by hitting the ESC key while Fedora developers also want to add F8 as another option since that key is the same for accessing the boot/rescue menu on Windows. For users wanting to still see the GRUB menu by default, they could still edit the /etc/default/grub. The plan is outlined on this Wiki page.

Their primary motive for hiding the GRUB menu comes down to a "smoother and faster boot experience", but not everyone sees that way. This devel list thread has been surprisingly active with users for and against this proposal. Among those concerned about it would be new users not knowing how to easily revert to an older kernel if needed, the lack of a visual clue how to access GRUB, etc. We'll see how this plays out in the weeks ahead.