On Jul 2, 2015, at 9:21 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote: > > CentOS doesn't support dual boot, because I did all the work to > make that happen, the CentOS installer did nothing to help me make > this possible. If free space on a drive is available at time of installation, CentOS will let you install itself into it, and it will even offer to put its boot loader on a CentOS partition instead of overwriting the boot drive’s boot sector. That counts as “supports dual boot” in my book. I do not require that CentOS be able to *create* that free space. That’s my job. > Just like the car dealer doesn't support this new head > unit I installed, because I installed it. If you buy a car from a dealer and it has an open DIN bay, you can install your own head unit into it. This is exactly analogous to booting the CentOS installer with free space on a second drive or an unused partition. Just because most cars come off the lot with something plugging that space up doesn’t mean it’s Crutchfield’s problem to fix, any more than it’s CentOS’s problem to fix UEFI+SB on your new Dell. Once again: It would indeed be *nice* if CentOS could resize an NTFS partition to make room for itself, despite UEFI+SB. My problem is only with your insistence that it *must* do this. >> Regardless, this is not the right place to argue about it. CentOS does not drive changes into Fedora or RHEL. If you want this fixed, get involved with Fedora. > > I included URLs for the bugs I either filed or have contributed to in > trying to get this problems solved *on Fedora*. So why are you continuing to bang on about it on a CentOS mailing list? No amount of yelling here will change anything. Take it to where you can effect change. I will expect to see the results of your efforts when CentOS 8 comes out, years hence. >> The idea that CentOS can or even should follow such a trajectory is ridiculous. > > No I'd be better off comparing it to Windows or OS X. Neither Windows nor OS X will nondestructively push aside a competing OS’s installation to make room for itself to dual-boot. > The reason why I compared to > Android is because it is Linux based and a lot of it is free software. Android only installs single-boot on hardware made specifically for it. It can make up whatever rules it likes for that hardware. You’re trying to extend that to CentOS pushing Windows aside on a machine that came from the factory running Windows. It’s a specious argument. > Android managed to get where it is today has to do with what's > made all of these things more successful than Linux on the desktop and > that's simply better user experience. Until you explain how you’re going to get CentOS to be preinstalled on a billion devices per year, I don’t see how you can connect Android’s success to CentOS. Where is the market force that will cause this to happen? > ...they use a Mac - which just so > happens to have this so totally figured out they've put a GUI boot > manager into the firmware While I will agree that holding Option or C down on boot is worlds better than madly pressing DEL and then poking around in a BIOS/EFI screen to switch around the boot order, I don’t really see what this has to do with the question at hand. OS X’s installer won’t push a Windows installation aside and make room for itself to dual-boot, either. Windows likewise won’t push OS X aside on Apple hardware. It requires Boot Camp’s help to do that, which is a nice tool, but you’re arguing against using third-party utilities. (Boot Camp being third-party with respect to Windows.) You’re asking CentOS to *exceed* what Apple, Microsoft, and Google do without giving it any of their market advantages first. >> There is no shielded enclave where nothing changes, and nothing breaks. > > Apple's installer. Nothing changes. Nothing's broken. Apple breaks stuff *all* *the* *time*. They’re famous for it. And I’m telling you this as an Apple fanboi. I have accepted the fact that I must cope with broken stuff on my Macs, just as I do on my CentOS boxen. > Windows installer? Nothing changes. Nothing's broken. Go compare the standard paths for changing network settings in Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10, and tell me Microsoft never moves things around. Go try to run No One Lives Forever on Windows 8, and tell me nothing breaks. And this despite Microsoft’s heroic levels of backwards-compatibility, fueled by $173 billion in assets, which allows it to employ 128,000 people. But CentOS must meet this same level. Y’right!