Fedora 37 Cleared To Ship 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.

The long-used Anaconda installer by RHEL and Fedora has relied upon a GTK-based graphical interface but for the past number of months they have been working to add a web-based UI that could also integrate as part of Red Hat's Cockpit project for remote/headless installs.

While the new web UI is still under development, they have planned for a preview of the new web-based install UI with Fedora 37.

The new Anaconda Web UI is still fairly simple and being fine-tuned but this preview support should allow more feedback and testing. The aim is to provide this alternative UI as a different install image available shortly after the official release.

The Anaconda Web UI will provide modern responsive user interface based on a well known and widely used toolkit (PatternFly) and backed by proven Cockpit tooling.

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

There are improvements in developer experience as well due to the more modern & more mainstream UI technology chosen and powerful Cockpit test tooling (rich unit-test as well as pixel-test framework). The stateless property of the Web UI allows almost live-coding style of UI development. This should make it easier to work on the Anaconda Web UI for not only the Anaconda team, addon developer but also for any interested contributors.

Remote Web UI access should also provide a much better experience than the slow and inefficient VNC based remote GUI installation support Anaconda has today. Due to no need for local rendering remotely driven GUI installations on a constrained hardware with minimal installation images should become possible.

The latest news on this new web-based installer effort is the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved this feature for Fedora 37. So assuming no technical issues come up and the preview can be made in time, those wanting to try out this modern web-based installer can do so at the end of October with Fedora 37.

Red Hat isn't the only one pursuing a modern web-based OS installer but SUSE is working on D-Installer as their new web-based Linux distribution installer too.