Future Plans For Changing Fedora's Installer

[Chewi]

By the time the new installer hit CentOS, I had luckily mostly scripted the installation for our Xen guests with a kickstart file, so we avoid most of the nastiness. We leave partitioning as a manual step as it can vary between guests but annoyingly, you still can't do this via a text console like Debian can, so you have to connect with VNC for this part. The most annoying thing is that you cannot change the default filesystem from XFS to ext4 in a kickstart script without fully defining the partition layout.

[gilboa]

I usually defend Fedora with passion (I literally use it to drive my company), but as far as the new Anaconda goes, I really dislike it.
I couldn't care less about the general design, application selection and the rest of the spokes, but the new disk partition spoke is still years behind the old parted-magic like disk partition engine - especially once you start dealing with complex, multiple disk w/ complex MDRAID setups.

In Fedora's defence, the disk partition engine has improved considerably in the last two or three releases, and its now fairly usable if you know what you're doing.
Never the less, I still wish they'd return to the old design...

- Gilboa

[You-]

There were benefits to the current design.

The biggest issue I had was one of having to silently trusting it would work.

Previously there was an option to remove all linux partitions and install Fedora to that space. More or less a safe option when you are dual booting.

Now you had to trust that that is what it would do and that it wouldnt clobber the bootloader etc - it didn't, but I only learnt that by installing Fedora from a position where I had no certainty that it would do the right thing.

[mark45]

Talk about incompetent people, they needed a year and feedback to hopefully realize their design is shit.

[Ericg]

I have only one wish for Anaconda. Improve performance. Compared to Debians Installer, Anaconda is damn horribly slow. You can find detailed informations here:

Candy I didn't read every comment in that bug report but isn't that restricted to a 7hr install in a virtualized environment? Granted it should be fixed but actual real-hardware installs don't take that long

[Candy]

I have only one wish for Anaconda. Improve performance. Compared to Debians Installer, Anaconda is damn horribly slow. You can find detailed informations here:

[edoantonioco]

Anaconda = a reason to not try Fedora (sadly)

[RahulSundaram]

This can cause trouble for spins with other DEs. Why not remove/disable duplicate features from gnome itself?

It wouldn't cause any trouble at all for other spins since as the article mentions, it would be a workstation specific change. Anaconda as part of the rewrite has become pretty modular and can handle such changes. The debate is more centered around usability concerns and the timeline.

[Ericg]

None of the changes listed should cause too large of a problem for KDE or other spins-- I say as a user of the KDE spin, and the author of the article.

[eydee]

This can cause trouble for spins with other DEs. Why not remove/disable duplicate features from gnome itself?