Trying Out Ubuntu's New Flutter+Curtin-Powered Desktop Installer Was Disappointing

[mangeek]

I think something I'd like is somewhere between "do it all for me" and "you're on your own". Like, ask me a few basics and give me choices.

Do I want a default EFI partition, or change the size?
Do I want a separate /boot partition?
Volume Manager or regular partitions?
Split / and /home? (pull slider to apportion each, or add with +, or create subvolumes)
Want to toggle any filesystems from default? [check this box for filesystem format options to recommendations for Hyper-V|VMware (mkfs.ext4 -G 4096)] [toggle this other one if your drive has RAID w/battery backup (nobarrier)] [toggle this if your system is a VM or uses hardware RAID (elevator=none)]

Oh, and a pull-down to output the commands run or download a cloud-init config of the settings you chose, like Server Manager in Windows does.

[waxhead]

Can someone...
.
please explain to me

Why the installer have one blank line

Between every GUI element?

Really... Whatever GUI crap they are building is infecting all common sense and logic these days. Worst thing is that it has so much traction amongst people. I am glad i am using Debian and when I need to use the installer for a VM or whatever, the text mode installer does it all.

It's is intuitive as well. Why is a graphical installer so important? Most people rarely need it and the pros or technical minded people don't mind and in some cases prefer the text mode installer.

...But then again most technical minded people probably don't use Ubuntu.

[cynic]

Wow, a lot of people seem to hate the idea of them trying to improve their installer.

because most people have problems understading and accepting that other people have different goals, different priorities, different value scales or simply different tastes.
Everybody nowadays think he have "the absolute truth in his own pocket" (as we Italians use to say) and the right to tell other what is the right thing to do.

[partcyborg]

I can't find it any more, but I have a photograph (somewhere) of an error that a spectrometer controller program used to throw up occasionally: "Error! No error."

I always used to assume that something it was doing in the background was supposed to fail, and if it didn't, there was a problem. But the pop up message would always make us laugh. Confused the hell out of users if they ever saw it, though.

As for ZFS at install - it might just need a couple of extra packages installed before the option becomes visible? e.g.: installing libzfs2linux zfs-initramfs zfsutils-linux and zfs-zed allows ZFS-root install for Linux Mint 20.2.

historically this would happen because parts of windows would not read and cachr errno at the time of the error, and by the time the ui would display it something else had already reset the value

[Paradigm Shifter]

historically this would happen because parts of windows would not read and cachr errno at the time of the error, and by the time the ui would display it something else had already reset the value

Yeah. The frustrating thing is, that particular hardware could either run Linux or Windows (we had a different machine which ran an absolutely ancient Red Hat 7 - not RHEL - and that was the only OS the manufacturer supported) and I can't remember whether it was the Linux or Windows version. Too many other things have happened since.

[royce]

Flutter on linux has definitely come a long way. I was a bit sceptical at first but after doing some work myself on flutter and dart I'm a convert. Not quite as good as native, but far nicer than electron to work with.

[etam]

I think something I'd like is somewhere between "do it all for me" and "you're on your own". Like, ask me a few basics and give me choices.

Do I want a default EFI partition, or change the size?
Do I want a separate /boot partition?
Volume Manager or regular partitions?
Split / and /home? (pull slider to apportion each, or add with +, or create subvolumes)
Want to toggle any filesystems from default? [check this box for filesystem format options to recommendations for Hyper-V|VMware (mkfs.ext4 -G 4096)] [toggle this other one if your drive has RAID w/battery backup (nobarrier)] [toggle this if your system is a VM or uses hardware RAID (elevator=none)]

Oh, and a pull-down to output the commands run or download a cloud-init config of the settings you chose, like Server Manager in Windows does.

openSUSE Installer is almost there. It has a powerful partitioner and can save your installation in format called AutoYaST.

https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/startup/html/book-startup/cha-install.html

[skierpage]

because most people have problems understading and accepting that other people have different goals, different priorities, different value scales or simply different tastes.

That's not the problem with Canonical. The problem is that post-Mir and Ubuntu Touch Canonical has no vision of where they want to go with Ubuntu on the desktop. Where's the equivalent of Christian Schaller at RedHat's regular series of posts about what Fedora is trying to achieve with Fedora Workstation? I find them quite inspiring, the latest is Fedora Workstation: Our Vision for Linux Desktop. Mark Shuttleworth speaks in general terms about Ubuntu but what does Canonical want to get done for desktop Ubuntu in the next two years? I feel sorry for Ubuntu engineers.

[Ironmask]

Wow, a lot of people seem to hate the idea of them trying to improve their installer.

Actually, that isn't the issue. No, we actually want them to improve their installer. So we think it's a bad decision to throw it away and just make an entire new one. This is a very common trope in software engineering, "not invented here", "reinventing the wheel", "second system syndrome", etc., etc.. The point is, any seasoned software engineer will tell you not to throw everything out and rewrite it, but just keep maintaining the years and years of hard work, engineering and labor that went into the existing product. I've heard this from countless software engineers with decades of history under their belt while they run some pretty successful consulting firms.

[RahulSundaram]

That's not the problem with Canonical. The problem is that post-Mir and Ubuntu Touch Canonical has no vision of where they want to go with Ubuntu on the desktop. Where's the equivalent of Christian Schaller at RedHat's regular series of posts about what Fedora is trying to achieve with Fedora Workstation? I find them quite inspiring, the latest is Fedora Workstation: Our Vision for Linux Desktop. Mark Shuttleworth speaks in general terms about Ubuntu but what does Canonical want to get done for desktop Ubuntu in the next two years? I feel sorry for Ubuntu engineers.

A big part of that change is that earlier on. they were investing more and marketing around desktop users. This was certainly an exciting thing for desktop users. I didn't consider that to be commercially viably directly but as a way to get more users, some of whom will end up using it on the server, phone or embedded environments where there is potential for revenue. When they had this post up

https://ubuntu.com/blog/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence

They ended up letting go a lot of their desktop engineers, this was a good move likely from a commercial perspective but I don't know that they are operating in an environment now where there is a lot of new exciting projects for regular desktop users anymore. I don't follow what's happening there as closely anymore so if someone is an active user and excited about projects they are working on, let me know. I would be interested in hearing about it.