Fedora 37 Cleared To Ship Experimental Web UI Based Installer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora 37 Cleared To Ship With Experimental Web UI Based Installer

Red Hat has been working on a web-based UI for its Anaconda operating system installer and for the Fedora 37 release this autumn they are planning to have an optional preview of this new installer interface...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Anaconda-Web-UI-FESCo-F37

[dkasak]

I still wonder why gtk's broadway html5 backend couldn't have been used instead. I get that html wranglers are a dime-a-dozen, but is maintaining a gtk-based installer that works on the desktop *and* web via broadway really that hard?

[Vorpal]

I still wonder why gtk's broadway html5 backend couldn't have been used instead. I get that html wranglers are a dime-a-dozen, but is maintaining a gtk-based installer that works on the desktop *and* web via broadway really that hard?

Why would they need to keep the old installer GUI at all in the long term? You can show the web UI locally as well. That way they don't need to maintain two guis.

And the quote in the article seems to answer the question as to why not use gtk rendering to html: they want a more "modern" approach based around modern languages etc. I would be very surprised if gtk can be used with live coding in the browser (maybe with bindings to a dynamic language?)

[jorgepl]

Why would they need to keep the old installer GUI at all in the long term? You can show the web UI locally as well. That way they don't need to maintain two guis.

And the quote in the article seems to answer the question as to why not use gtk rendering to html: they want a more "modern" approach based around modern languages etc. I would be very surprised if gtk can be used with live coding in the browser (maybe with bindings to a dynamic language?)

Some of us prefer native toolkits. Better performance and integration with the system.

[david-nk]

It's frustrating that even an OS installer is now a glorified website simply because younger developers do not know any programming language other than JavaScript.
Computers keep getting faster, but applications keep getting bigger, slower and buggier.

[mxan]

Some of us prefer native toolkits. Better performance and integration with the system.

Better performance, unless you need to do a remote install (e.g. embedded usecases), then you're stuck using slow VNC. Better integration, unless you run KDE Plasma where "OK" buttons at the top don't make sense.

By the way, the GTK Anaconda installer is still the default in Fedora 37. This Cockpit-based installer is optional. And having a web-based UI doesn't automatically mean tangibly worse performance.

[dkasak]

Why would they need to keep the old installer GUI at all in the long term?

Because it already exists, and works for both local and web clients.

And the quote in the article seems to answer the question as to why not use gtk rendering to html: they want a more "modern" approach based around modern languages etc. I would be very surprised if gtk can be used with live coding in the browser (maybe with bindings to a dynamic language?)

LOL. I know UI developers who come out with this kind of shit - "live coding". I fail to see the benefit here. It sounds a lot more like some individual or small group of UI developers became responsible for the installer app, and came up with a list of bullet points that differentiates their chosen web framework from what they consider "ancient" languages ( ie not some JS framework released in the past 2 months ), and then declared that these were all the things that they in fact need to do that can't currently be done.