Canonical Aiming For A New Desktop Installer With Ubuntu 21.10

[Alexmitter]

Why exactly is this needed? I agree with Danny3, the partitioning can certainly use some work. But why do they need to re-do the whole thing? And just how deep do Google's teeth go here? That raises a big red flag with me. The minute my OS starts connecting to Google servers will be the minute I find a new OS.

They just use a UI toolkit google developed. Canonical also shipps Qt, the worlds most unethical toolkit and no one seemed to care so I expect no one to care for that installer that uses a toolkit google made.

[f0rmat]

Except that the image looks like a wrench stripped the head of an Ubuntu bolt. Because I actually work with wrenches and bolts, that was my first thought.

Maybe instead of a wrench it should be an Irwin extractor and a corded drill then? I also noticed rounded bolt head - they should not have used vice-grips.

[f0rmat]

For fuck sake, they should first fix the installer first to not complain about EFI partitions when there's no UEFI because the computer doesn't have UEFI or because the user has not chosen an UEFI boot and fix the grub-install failing at the end of the installation for no good reason!

Second, the most important part of the installer in my opinion is the drive and partitions selection page and that should be completely redesigned.

Just display a tree-like structure with drives on the first level and partitions on the second like:
Drive 1
....Partition 1
....Parition 2

Drive 2
....Partition 1
....Parition 2
....Parition 3

Instead of displaying 10 partitions all together with useless names like /dev/sdX and with the sizez in MiB instead of GiB
For more user friendliness after the Drive # could be put in parentheses the name of the drive and location like;
Drive 1 (SSD Samsung 512 GiB on /dev/sda)
Drive 2 (HDD Seagate 4 TiB on /dev/sdb)

Faster speed drives should be put at the top as there is the most likey location where the user wants to install the OS and its programs like:
Drive 1 (M.2 SSD....)
............................
Drive 2 (SATA SSD....)
Drive 3 (SATA HDD...)
And so on....

The bootloader drive should be selected automatically based on the partition(s) chosen to install the OS, but changeable by the user to another drive if he wants to.

I agree with you 100%. The state of the GUI partitioning in many of these installers is barely adequate at best and horrible at worst. Many GUI installers cannot even recognize what the partitions are except for their device name (I have used some that could not always identify the file system (looking at you swap)). If you do not know the partitions, you can really bork your system. And if you have multiple partitions (more than about 5 or 6), some installers take forever to identify them. That is one area where Gnome has it right - GParted simply works. I always keep a bootable USB stick with the latest version of GParted on it as when I am about to rework any partitions or I need to make sure I have every partition correctly identified. Yes I can identify partitions from the CLI, but the ease of GParted (as well as the clumsiness of my big fat fingers) make GParted my first choice.

[cl333r]

But why? The installer is one of the parts of Ubuntu that needs the least amount of work.
It has a nice clean design and is fast & reliable as far as I can tell.

Yeah, Ubuntu's easy & reliable installer is one of the top reasons I use Ubuntu.
Also, what is the current installer written in? C++? If so since when is it too difficult for experienced devs to maintain a C++ app?

[andre30correia]

so msny complains, They make their one distro they make their decisions, at least they put every two years a good lts distro to desktop users and devs. Ubuntu 20.04 works great here for all proposes and 22.04 will do the same with new tech as always, others distros are nightmare to maintain

[Danny3]

I agree with you 100%. The state of the GUI partitioning in many of these installers is barely adequate at best and horrible at worst. Many GUI installers cannot even recognize what the partitions are except for their device name (I have used some that could not always identify the file system (looking at you swap)). If you do not know the partitions, you can really bork your system. And if you have multiple partitions (more than about 5 or 6), some installers take forever to identify them. That is one area where Gnome has it right - GParted simply works. I always keep a bootable USB stick with the latest version of GParted on it as when I am about to rework any partitions or I need to make sure I have every partition correctly identified. Yes I can identify partitions from the CLI, but the ease of GParted (as well as the clumsiness of my big fat fingers) make GParted my first choice.

Thank you!

As a Kubuntu user, I always start in "Try mode" instead of "Install mode" to be able to start other programs before or during installation and I open the KDE Partition manager to identify the SSD drive where I want to install by looking at their name (Samsung, ADATA, etc) and their location (/dev/sdX) and the partitions locations.

I like Gparted too and I install it sometimes if I have internet or boot into its live cd before and do all the changes.
Hopefully someone will take these good design ideas from either KDE Partition manager or Gparted and put it in the installers themselves.

[f0rmat]

Thank you!

As a Kubuntu user, I always start in "Try mode" instead of "Install mode" to be able to start other programs before or during installation and I open the KDE Partition manager to identify the SSD drive where I want to install by looking at their name (Samsung, ADATA, etc) and their location (/dev/sdX) and the partitions locations.

I like Gparted too and I install it sometimes if I have internet or boot into its live cd before and do all the changes.
Hopefully someone will take these good design ideas from either KDE Partition manager or Gparted and put it in the installers themselves.

Another trick which works with multiboot system where one of the systems is Windows is to use the Disk Management tab in the Computer Management Administrative MMC. It can help identify what you have - particularly with regards to partition numbers. GParted is still far superior, but when it comes to shrinking or enlarging partitions, I need every tool I can use so I can triple verify. That is especially true since my multi-boot system shares the same home drive with two linux distros and Windows 10. (Obviously the home partition is on an NTFS file system - and the desktop folders are not shared - that gets ugly and I very seldom keep stuff on my desktop.)

[moriel5]

From a consumer's point of view, I have never had a good experience with apps built with Flutter.
Apps were always heavy, both on storage and system resources, with both performance and latency taking a hit, even in more powerful devices (where these apps could at least respond after less than a minute and a half), not to mention the damage to battery life on mobile devices.

And this is regardless of operating system and CPU arch, this was consistent across Windows, Linux and Android (still have yet to figure out how to build a Hackintosh, after I get the budget for a new motherboard, AsRock's 9-series boards are notoriously unstable, with mine literally in the process of dying), and on arm7, arm8, x86, and x64 (both amd64 and x86-64).

[Danielsan]

Casually some weeks (or months) ago Pope of Canonical talked about to refresh the installer... What a mysterious coincidence... Anyway I really dislike material design, it also stinks Gugl... It makes sense on Android but it would be a nightmare if we start to have all our environment that resemble Android, no please... But it looks like that catching up devs is the new trend. The ridiculous part is that people will use the new Ubuntu installer on WSL2...

Anyway Ubuntu has a great brand new CLI installer... Everytime I install a new Debian I don't use the graphic installer the CLI is better and faster.

[davidbepo]

Probably because its horrible and based on proprietary sold software by a company who likes to threaten its community and fans.

wat??