[I know this might not be the best place to post this, but I don’t see a better one.]
I wanted to take a fresh look at the WebUI installer. I did a fresh install and a re-install over a previous install using installation ISOs in a VM. Some unstructed notes below and then a summary/evaluation.
Ubuntu with subiquity (ubuntu-24.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso)
- A linear flow with a very good toolkit. Visually this looks great.
- The installer uses the full window provided by libvirt, does not need resizing.
- The installer boots very quickly.
- Plays a sound when the installer is up, a nice touch for accessibility.
- There’s a “accessibility settings” panel early on.
- “Ads” are displayed very well and showcase various games and tools.
- Features a stop button that has no effect.
Advanced partitioning:
- not able to create & mount a /home subvolume?
- clicking ‘back’ loses the configured partition layout
- a spectre vda2 1MB partition is inserted with no type, name, or explanation.
(This is probably a biosboot partition, but it’s displayed very badly.)
Guided partitioning:
- offers a limited set of choices
- encryption seems to be only an option with LVM, so the modern encryption + btrfs does not seem to be an option
- LUKS password is not tested for strength (user password is)
- description of steps is only partial: “partition vda2 formatted as ext4 used for /boot”, “partition vda3 created”
Fedora WebUI installer (Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-Rawhide-20240927.n.0.iso)
-
“Destination 0x1af4 (vda) 21.5 GB disk”.
I tried to figure out what 0x1af4 is, to no avail. Doesn’t match the block device number. -
The curse of mandatory password strength requirements returns.
“Must be at least 6 characters”
(But at least “weak” is allowed.) -
Display of subvolumes is not great:
“/ vda3 20.4 GB format as btrfs encrypt”
“/home vda3 20.4 GB format as btrfs encrypt”
If one doesn’t know that the default setup uses subvolumes, this looks like an error. -
Going back loses state!
Password is forgotten. -
“Language: English (United States)” is automatically selected without any choice.
If the language can be configured later, then this should probably say so.
But it’s not clear what keymap is used for the LUKS password.
(Later: it’s always “us”.) -
Storage editor is very well hidden under a three-dot menu
-
The disk is displayed as “unformatted data”. Clicking format
open a dialogue to format /dev/vda (whole disk) as ext4 (sic). -
The requirement on password length is not present here.
-
Strength of password is not shown.
-
I see “Encryption options” free text field. Who knows what that is for?
-
On an existing partition, shrinking or growing is not supported.
“btrfs cannot be resized”. ?? -
The installer actually displays subvolumes as such, nice.
-
It doesn’t seem possible to create a subvolume.
“Subvolume needs to be mounted”. -
After mounting, the subvolume can be created, but it’s not obvious.
-
"Critical error
The installer cannot continue due to critical error.
Error details:
TypeError: n[A] is undefined
"
That is followed by journal dump for the boot. -
Report bug opens (I think) a firefox window to log in to bugzilla.
After typing (maybe?) a wrong password, I see “Please press Back to try again.” but the window has navigation hidden, so there are no buttons. -
After logging in, there’s a prefilled bugzilla ticket, with the text “Please attach the log file /tmp/webui.log to the issue.” which I guess the user is supposed to do manually.
-
Bug 2315891 filed.
-
After submitting bug, the window stays open fullscreen.
The user has to figure out how to switch back to the installer.
(Not that it does much good, since the only option is to quit.) -
After the installer exits, I see that /dev/vda1 with LUKS was created, but I cannot open it. The password was “asdfasdf”, so I don’t think it’s likely that I made a typo in the passphrase. Instead, maybe the password wasn’t actually set?
-
Of course reboot fails because the disk is not usable.
-
A second install succeeds. (I know what to avoid.)
-
After a reboot, the boot seems very slow.
I see “Process 1345 (abtrd) of user 0 dumped core.”
Oh, "Failed with result ‘timeout’.
Also “Failed to start app-gnome-vmware\x2duser-2758.scope”,
“no such process”. (I think it’s an known bug.)
Those are problems not with the installer, but with rawhide itself.
Reinstall
-
After a reboot and selecting to erase existing data, I see “vda1 delete”, but new partitions are numbered from vda2.
-
No warning about using a prerelease installer.
-
I also tried if preserving /home works.
This doesn’t seem possible? (“Reclaim space” works at the level of partitions. In “Manual disk configuration” I can assign mount points, but it seems like I need to select “Reformat”. It doesn’t seem to have a concept of only deleting the subvolume.)It's difficult to reformat a btrfs partition/subvolume in the installer
-
The display of subvolumes and partions is … bad.
I have to guess that “vda2” is a partition, and “root” is a subvolume under vda3.
F41 beta (Fedora-Workstation-Live-x86_64-41_Beta-1.2.iso)
-
Language can be selected
-
The interface seems rather confusing and cluttered.
Esp. after coming back from the very clean Ubuntu. -
vda is described as “0x1af4 ()”
-
A detailed preview of operations is shown
-
“Disks will not be modified until ‘start installation’ is clicked”
(approx. text, reverse translation from Polish)
Very clear and welcome. -
After clicking “stop installation”, Anaconda exits, but stuff
is still happening in the background. Subsequent start of Anaconda
hangs. -
When doing “automatic partitioning” with “remove existing data”, I can
select what should remain. Existing partitions are not wiped until
I click “Begin installation”. -
When redoing interruped installation, the next install fails with
“luks device not configured” and Anaconda hangs.
‘“Install to Hard Drive” Is Not Responding’ pops up. -
Starting Anaconda again fails. Next attempt works.
-
This time I selected “Remove everything” and installation succeeds.
-
I also tried a repeated install to test if preseving /home works.
The same as for the WebUI installer, this just doesn’t seem possible?
When I try to assing existing “root” subvolume as new root,
it says “You must create a new file system on the root device.”
and refuses.
The best option I could find was to create a new root subvolume.
After reinstallation, I’m asked to create a user, and end up
with /home/$olduser and /home/$newuser owned by $newuser.
Meh. -
When I unlock Luks partition, a dialogue is shown that Anaconda is not
responding for a few seconds. Then it goes away. -
“vfat cannot be used for /boot”, bollocks.
Conclusions
The new Fedora WebUI and Ubuntu’s subiquity seem to share the same general UI concepts. The linear workflow with panels and next, next, next… is very clear. Even if there’s a bunch of those, the user can go through them very quickly. This seems a win over the previous Anaconda design. Nevertheless, it’s very important to never lose state. Every time I clicked “back” to check some setting from an earlier panel and lost state, I was very annoyed. If this was an actual install with real data and long passwords, that’d be even worse. Thus, linear series of panels is good, but state must be carefully maintained.
Accessibility in Subiquity seems to be core design feature. (I didn’t actually try any of the accessibility features, so no idea if they actually work.) Previous Fedora installer had internationalization of the installer, this seems gone with WebUI.
All of the installers display crucial information about disk state badly. They just differ in what parts are particularly bad. It is clear that subvolumes were added later, so instead of saying something useful like partition vda3, type btrfs, subvolume "root", Anaconda says "root" and leaves the user to figure out what it means and which of the 5 meanings of word root is meant here. In other places, subvolumes are displayed alongside partitions with no visual distinction.
A killer feature for people who upgrade Fedora Workstation is to keep /home subvolume and reinstall the OS in “root”. With a bit of manual twiddling this can be done, but the installer doesn’t help in any way. It seems that no consideration for this very important workflow has been made.
Each of the installers has various bugs. Just trying to set up a simple setup with a standard layout is enough to cause a crash. If anything goes wrong, any any changes have already been made, the user is left with a half-installed system. (The problem is worse with an installer that applies changes immediately.) Each installer has some random limitations, some of which can be worked around because the checks are not applied uniformly. Subiquity guided partitioning only supports a few legacy layouts that they care about (LVM, ZFS), a Workstation-like layout with btrfs and encryption would require manual configuration. Anaconda supports btrfs, but halfheartedly, it also doesn’t allow VFAT for /boot for bogus reasons.
In the Fedora context, the big question is whether “old anaconda” or the new WebUI is better. Based on my tests, I would say that visually, WebUI is better. (Though Subuiquity looks even better.) Nevertheless, the functionality in the old installer is better. There is nothing in the new installer that makes me say “oh, this works much better then before”.