Fedora 37 Hopes To Have A Preview Of The New Web-Based Install UI

[GrayShade]

I see this type of bug everyday where dynamic typed languages are used (luckily I care about my work and don't use such languages).

Anaconda is written in Python anyway. The term you want is "weakly-typed". But of course, double the languages, double the fun.

And in my experience, it's pretty unreliable, sometimes crashing at the beginning of the installation process, only to work after a reboot.

[jorgepl]

anything but please not something as shitty as Opensuse one

OpenSuse's installer is really really shitty to be fair...

[cynic]

Anaconda is written in Python anyway. The term you want is "weakly-typed". But of course, double the languages, double the fun.

sure, but a web-based rewrite will almost surely involve some JavaScript

[GrayShade]

sure, but a web-based rewrite will almost surely involve some JavaScript

I think it will be a Web UI with the current Python backend, so.. yeah. Fun.

[cynic]

I think it will be a Web UI with the current Python backend, so.. yeah. Fun.

they're using patternfly for the UI, that is JS

[Schmellow]

The screen layout is based on latest UX design guidelines as well as usability testing of the new interface and extensive mockup work

And apparently usability tests tell you that back and quit buttons should be placed after next ("begin installation") button?
Well at least they are not randomly placed as in current anaconda, so that's an improvement already

[Luke_Wolf]

OpenSuse's installer is really really shitty to be fair...

What are you two on about? Like Vistaus I find the OpenSUSE installer to be one of the best and I fail to see anything bad about it. You can just click next through it and get a good default install, but if you want something more custom it's powerful enough to give you that, and unlike some other distros I could name it's rock solid reliable and doesn't have any weird hangs.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

OpenSuse's installer is really really shitty to be fair...

There are pros and cons to the OpenSUSE installer.

Bad Stuff

• The hardware detection phase is suuuuuper slooooooow. You may as well go do some other small task while that triple green progress bar does its thing.
• For the Tumbleweed net installer, it has to redownload a boot image that matches the current snapshot if the image you are using isn't the very latest snapshot and start the process over at the freaking slow hardware detection! A network installer should be able to grab all the latest packages even if it isn't the very latest snapshot itself.
• For users who are new to Linux, it is way over complicated in general. Most of the capabilities should be behind some "advanced" mode.
• Once you actually start the package installation, it is slow (partly because zypper isn't exactly blazing fast and often times the mirror selected by MirrorBrain is also slow).
• It doesn't even work on my DP KVM + Nvidia desktop, once the hardware detection starts I never get a display output again. I have to hook up another display just to do installs for Leap / Tumbleweed (yes this is super niche).
• In general the handling for Nvidia graphics could be greatly improved, e.g. make it easy to optionally add the repo as part of the installer.
• The guided partitioner setup phase doesn't show you model information for drives, so you may have to go into Expert first to look at the drive assignment, then cancel, just to make sure you are selecting the right disk. To be fair, almost all Linux distros are absolute shit at this. It is completely ridiculous to not show the drive model when the installer knows damn well what they are. It's super fun when you have a bunch of drives of the same size in the system. Gee...is it nvme0n1 or nvme1n1 or nvme2n1? How about you tell me that it's a WD Blue SN570 or the WD Black SN750 or the Hynix Gold in my system?
• This isn't really an issue with the installer itself, but they have deviated more over time from upstream DE defaults, and I have to spend more time fixing little things once the system is installed.

Good stuff

• It has a ton of options (which again should probably be behind some "advanced" switch).
  • CPU mitigations
  • SSH enabled / disabled
  • Port for SSH opened / closed in firewall (this should probably default to open if you set SSH to enabled, having to flip on both of these always feels dumb. If I want SSH enabled, chances are I actually want to be able to connect over SSH!)
  • Copying ssh keys by default for previous installs
  • [...]
• You get granular control down to the package level of what you want to add or remove from whatever Patterns you select.
• + some other stuff

But in general I think the installer needs a lot of love, so it's good that they are (copying Fedora?) building a web based installer. There are certain times during the install where it shows how crusty it is and I always laugh. Like during the disk probing, there's actually a progress step shown to the user about probing firewire disks. Who in the hell is installing Linux on a firewire disk in 2022? It must be 0.001% of OpenSUSE users. It's just comical that it is still shown.

[undefined]

Is reading the documentation too much to ask for? That being the default sort also makes sense, as arrays can have items of different types, not just numbers.

I don't like the part where it does weird stuff instead of failing. If you can't compare two objects, then just throw an exception, there is no need to do something stupid. I understand that this behavior is probably documented, I am not even talking about these specific problems, I am more worried about the general philosophy of some languages to not fail and do weird things instead of failing. I don't even say that this behavior is bad - au contraire, in most web application there is no need for script to die if it can somehow continue. Not a big deal if menus on a web page are in a wrong order or whatever. Just not the best behavior for critical things, like hard drive partitioning, where it can accidentally delete some other partition because it sorted something wrong. I completely understand logically that probably developers will carefully check everything 100 times and it will work reliably. Still, it gives me shivers.

[undefined]

you can create bugs in every language.

Yeah, sure, I understand that. I just don't like when languages continue to execute when bugs occur instead of dying. This behavior is fine in many cases, like for webpages where it doesn't matter in 99% of cases if something has been sorted incorrectly or whatever and it is better to continue working through everything. But I don't favor it for cases I consider critical, for example when you are working with partitions. I would rather have program to die instead of incorrectly sorting my list of partitions or living through other weird things like that. Of course it doesn't mean that a program on C++ or Rust would be without bugs, it is just that the surface is much smaller and languages like Rust are usually more likely to fail in case something goes wrong.