Fedora Installer Improvement Suggestions

Ask Fedora
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1

I did an install with the everything installer today, for reasons, and encountered a couple of frustrations:

First is the UI scaling, using a 40 inch screen with a native resolution of 4k everything is minuscule, so I’d like to suggest either an option for resolution in the installer or for the installer to behave as websites do (having elements take up a proportion of the available space).

Second is the partitioning section, selecting the drive(s) you want to use is nice and clear but everything after is worryingly nebulous, for example: You select custom partitioning and the installer doesn’t do anything until you press the done button, while I’m on this point the advanced option mentions a “Blivet gui” which means nothing to me.

Once you press the done button though, you’re then provided with a partitioning screen but while you’re selecting the properties of a partition (size and mount point) the installer gives no apparent indication of which drive that partition is going on and only provides that information after you confirm said properties.

My proposed solution to the first of these issues would be to make the partition UI part of the drive selection UI so that when you select custom, or advanced, partitioning, the relevant UI elements show up below the drive selection section. The second of these issues is fixed easily enough by giving a clear indication of which drive a partition is going on, be that a simple label when a user selects a single drive for installation or a dropdown menu when multiple are involved. Personally I believe Ubuntu/Mint does this really well, there is no mistaking where you’re putting partitions in that UI.

One last thing that isn’t so much a frustration as a quality of life thing: The progress bar for installation, I believe it would benefit from being split into two parts: Overall progress per the existing bar and a current item bar so that users can see more clearly what is going on with longer installation times.

2

The Install developers do monitor this forum.
Hopefully you will see responses from them.

At least with the KDE plasma installer it defaults to scaling to 170% on a 4k screen.
The grub menu is tiny and that could be fixed by configuring grub to use a VESA 1024x768 mode.

I have not tested Gnome to see what it does. If it does not scale by default that is worth reporting as a UX problem.

3

“Everything installer” still uses the old GTK-based interface which we plan to deprecate in teh future. Thus, while your feedback is valuable, as an example of the issues a newcomer sees when they use the old UI, we will not going to invest too much effort in fixing them.

Instead, if possible, I would suggest to test the new Web UI (the one which is currently enabled by default for all Live images) and try to do the same installation with the same goal and on the similar hardware.

This would be valuable for us to know which things you would find working better (probably scaling would be resolved automatically) and which things you find missing.

4

I’ll have a look into that this weekend and post my thoughts here then.

5

As promised, I ran the KDE live session installer and hit an unexpected wall in partitioning but first I have to mention scaling again, this time with a picture (I have a few and they’re taken on my phone, some are blurry, sorry.)

Sizing
Sizing1920×1080 348 KB

It’s better than the everything installer but I still have to sit forward in my chair to read it properly. (This is default settings for resolution and scale, I only changed the refresh rate because of HDMI limitations)

So now we come to disks, the disk selection UI is nice - I prefer the old version in part because of scaling again but that’s just preference, the function is fine. I do like that it clearly shows the name, size, format and installed OS (if applicable) on each partition, I just wish (again) that it would scale to a larger size.

Now of partitions, as stated at the top I hit a wall here, I used a USB drive with a testing install I used previously and in the partitioning menu it complained about efi. I should have taken a picture but I moved on to trying to twist it’s arm too fast, not that it helped, when I removed the partitions the installer removed the option to manually partition the disk(s). (Sorry again for the blurry pics)

SDG
SDG1920×1080 278 KB

SDH
SDH1920×1080 284 KB

Finally I decided to go back to a single disk setup and pre-made the partitions in the kde partition manager, except that the partition manager doesn’t have an option to make an efi system partition and the installer didn’t want to format /boot/efi which lead to this situation:

EFI Fail
EFI Fail1920×1080 347 KB

It’s at this point I threw in the towel, I don’t know if it’s because I’m using USB drives or what but it really doesn’t want to play. I do know the installer itself was fine before I used it for this test as it had been used to install on another system.

That said, I do like this screen, again it could be bigger when displayed on my 43 inch screen but functionally the only thing missing is a dropdown for mount points - the current text input only approach is fine if the user knows all the mounts they need/want but someone used to partitioning Windows or otherwise new to partitioning Linux would benefit from more information (I’m thinking about /linuxswap and /home).

One last nice touch would be a bit of text somewhere either on the partition screen or on the disk selection screen indicating when partition settings will be applied. I fully understand the expectation that people use only those disks/partitions they are happy to lose all data on and the installer does duly warn about the consequences of formatting but knowing when that format will take place is reassuring.

I may have another look come F45 but my intent is to do a fresh install with the everything installer to erase some failed experiments and do a slightly stripped down KDE install.

6

Actually, it does, but it is not exactly intuitive how to do that.

First create the partition with a files system type fat32. Apply the change. After that open properties for the new partition and click on the checkbox for “boot”, and then apply again.

7

Thanks for the tip. If I’m lucky I might remember it.