Fedora Workstation's Anaconda Web UI Installer Delayed To Fedora 41

For over two years Red Hat's engineers working on the Anaconda installer have been working on a modern web-based installer UI that integrates with Cockpit and is a modern alternative to their GTK-based installer interface for deploying Fedora Linux and eventually RHEL too. The hope was to offer this web UI installer option for Fedora Workstation 40 but that's now been delayed to Fedora 41.

There was a change proposal approved for Fedora 40 to offer the Anaconda web UI for Fedora Workstation by default. The previously-approved proposal reads:

"The new PatternFly-based UI has been developed by the Anaconda team for some time now and we would like to make it available for users of Fedora to enhance and modernize installation experience. As the first step in this user adoption process, we are targeting Fedora Workstation only."

But a showstopping issue has come to light that has now led to this feature being diverted to Fedora 41 instead. The matter was raised over an important difference in behavior during the storage/disk setup between the existing installer and the new web UI solution. With the existing behavior on Fedora 39 and prior, the user could queue up storage changes to make for the installation and then apply it as a batch after all of the changes have been made. But with the Cockpit-based UI, the storage changes are applied immediately as selected. With the storage changes being applied immediately rather than at the end of making all storage configuration changes, there is valid concern that a miss-click or other storage miss-configuration issue could lead to unintended data loss.

To avoid risking the unintended data loss due to this fundamental difference in how storage configuration changes are made, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) decided to delay the web UI installer change to the Fedora 41 cycle.

FESCo decided today:

* AGREED: Changes/AnacondaWebUIforFedoraWorkstation is postponed to F41.
FESCo and QA will help arrange mass-testing early in the F41 cycle, shortly after F40 GA. (+5, 0, 0)

So it will be more waiting before finding this new Fedora Linux installer web UI by default on Fedora Workstation... If all goes well Fedora Workstation 41 in the autumn.