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Anaconda WebUI for Fedora Workstation by default

Summary

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.

Owner

  • Name: Anaconda team ( Jiří Konečný)
  • Email: jkonecny@redhat.com
  • Name: Fedora Workstation SIG
  • Email: desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org


Current status

Detailed Description

The Anaconda team has been working on a new web-based UI for the OS installer for some time. We would like to give users the fruits of our work and get feedback so that we know what we need to improve or where we should focus. To make the adoption as painless as possible, the Fedora Workstation was chosen as the first target so we have better control over the environment and can have a focus. Also, Fedora Workstation has a smaller featureset than other installation media. The adoption for the other media later is planned too, but the exact date will be based on feedback and our capacity allowance.

What will not change with the new Web UI?

The new UI will mostly use already existing functional code (some modifications are necessary), so the stability should be similar. The Anaconda specific kernel boot parameters are also staying almost unchanged. The Anaconda team aims to reduce functionality that is not used but still put a maintenance burden on the team. This should result in much easier future extensions and stability of the installer. The current approach is to start from what is known to be required and used, then add future features based on the feedback.

What is going to change with the new Web UI?

The new web UI is not just a change of the UI technology, which is based on the React and Cockpit framework, but also a complete overhaul of the user experience. The new UI is trying to be easier to use by removing most of the complexities but still leaving possibilities to do everything you might need to do. We are trying to achieve a state where even users who don’t have previous experience with the Linux operating system will be able to do the installation smoothly.

List of what is part of the new UI:

  • Wizard solution instead of hub and spoke
  • New welcome screen to select language (will be preselected from a language configured in system)
  • Timezone and date configuration
  • Disk selection
  • Guided partitioning
  • Review configuration
  • Installation progress
  • Build-in help

Let’s go over the important sections from the UI.

Use of wizard

Anaconda was a hub&spoke solution where users entered spoke to configure an aspect. The benefit of this solution is that you can skip what you don’t need. However, the drawback is that it’s much more information at once and harder to use when you are not familiar with what you need. For that reason, the team decided to go with an easier to use solution, the traditional wizard. See here for more details https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/anaconda-is-getting-a-new-suit-and-a-wizard/ .

Guided partitioning

The current (GTK) Anaconda UI approach is to have three types of partitioning.

  • Automatic - do everything automatically
  • Custom - you can do everything with top-down approach where users work on mount points and specified what technology they want to use and how
  • Blivet-gui - added later as bottom-up approach which enables users to create the partitioning stack themselves manually

These methods are giving great freedom but each of these has its issues. For automatic, the issue is almost no customizations and not a clear output. For custom and blivet-gui, you need to understand the Linux storage really well to know what you are doing, which could be intimidating. Because of those issues, we decided to choose another approach, which we are calling guided partitioning. This type of partitioning is giving users paths with explanations of what will happen but does not overload them with too many options at once. These paths could be then customized. This solution was taken as the best compromise between the automatic (no customization) and custom/blivet-gui, which was too heavy and hard to maintain.

We will provide the recommended solution and improved customization based on the users feedback. However, in case someone is not happy about the recommended solution, we are going to provide a way to guide users, to create their partitioning themselves (with a tool of their choice) and then tell Anaconda how to use it. This method could be also used for easy re-installation of the existing system and we are planning to improve the experience in the future even more.

Build-in help

Another pain point of the current UI is problematic help content. Currently, it’s a button that will show a lot of text from the documentation, which might be misleading because it’s not part of the feature development. To improve the state, the help side panel was added, which will provide specific help for what the user wants to know directly in a UI. For example, if you are in the guided partitioning screen you can find a link (blue text) with “learn more about the…” and after clicking on this you will find details about the given guided path. Another benefit of the new help solution is that it is part of the source code so it changes with the feature work and could be localized (harder to achieve before).

Changes not directly related to UI

The Anaconda team is in contact with Fedora Workstation SIG and actively working with them to get the best user experience for users. Together, we agreed on building the approach with the support of Gnome Initial Setup as part of the Fedora Workstation Live environment, which will prompt you for language and keyboard layout. Configuration from the system is then used by Anaconda. This way, Anaconda doesn't need to ask a second time for language (maybe just confirmation) and keyboard layout which will be converted from the live system into the installed system. This should result in a much better user experience.

Additional information

  • We are not planning to add support for spins with this change, they will use the existing GTK UI.
  • We don’t support remote connections to the WebUI yet.


Feedback

Currently we mainly discuss this with Fedora Workstation SIG and have their support for this change. We also have feedback from our preview builds https://fedoramagazine.org/anaconda-web-ui-preview-image-now-public/ . The feedback was mostly positive even though there are some concerns.

Other than that we also reached to Fedora QE team and Matthew Miller and more.

For more details about the feedback here are some tickets:

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora Workstation installation will have a more comfortable and better user experience, especially for the new-to-distro users. We are also targeting to have a consistent look and feel with Cockpit and Image Builder projects, so that users might be more familiar with the new Anaconda. By this, we would be more aligned with Fedora Workstation SIG goals of simple and easy-to-use solutions, and hide the complexities to make the installation experience more robust. It should be easier for users to reinstall the existing system. It will also allow the Anaconda team to make the extensions to the UI faster than it was before and should be less prone to errors compared to the current UI.

Scope

  • Proposal owners:
    • Anaconda team
    • Fedora Workstation SIG
  • Other developers: Should not have impact out of the Fedora Workstation Live environment.
  • Release engineering: Will be added
  • Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)
  • Trademark approval: TBD
  • Alignment with Community Initiatives:


How To Test

Standard installation testing of Live installation always before. We already reached the Fedora QE team to discuss an impact on them and ideally set the test day for more comprehensive testing with more details.

Steps:

Bugs should be filed to Red Hat Bugzilla on the Anaconda component.


User Experience

Installation of the system should provide a much better and more polished user experience. Compared to the current UI users should be fine without the familiarity of the complexities of OS installation.

Dependencies

  • Contingency mechanism: Return back to the current GTK UI by changing packages to build the ISO.
  • Contingency deadline: Beta freeze
  • Blocks release? No, we can ship without the new web UI

Documentation will be expected especially for custom partitioning replacement but not only that.

Release Notes

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