Hello everyone, this topic is created specifically for the feedback collection for Test Week of Anaconda Web UI installer for Fedora Workstation. Please use this place to post your opinions and vote in the polls below. That will allow us to have better focus on things which bothers you. Also if you like this new UI, please vote here too or just say a word, it’s always great to see that someone likes your work!
This post is created only for feedback collection. In case you find a bug, please report it to Bugzilla on the anaconda-webui component. If you want to go deeper into requesting some change, please use GitHub discussion for that.
Please take a look at the resources above describing how you can join the test initiative. We welcome everyone to join the Test Days! You only need a VM and if you have a physical HW which can be reinstalled for the test purpose, that is even better!
Known issues
Here is a list of issues we are aware of:
Keyboard and Language can’t be set.
This is an unfortunate but temporary state. Anaconda takes the configuration from the life system which should be set by Gnome Initial Setup, however, they are missing required changes after the Gnome Shell rebase.
The Reinstall Fedora guided partitioning workflow is a new feature and it has its limitations.
Only Fedora system is supported with default installations.
We don’t support this feature if you have multiple systems installed.
Only one user account could be reused this way (others are not erased, just not integrated into the system automatically).
Users needs to write correct username in the Gnome Initial Setup after installation.
We are planning to inform users about this required step for Fedora 42, we probably are not able to fix it correctly but we are planning to do that in future releases.
Shrinking is not supported for every filesystem.
You can shrink a filesystem but the support is similar to what Anaconda had with GTK UI. Only some partition types are supported for shrinking (BTRFS is not included).
We are planning to add support in future releases, probably not for F42.
Polls
How satisfied are you with the WebUI overall? (1 - Not Satisfied, 5 - Completely Satisfied)
Rescan devices button jumps around when clicked. Probably because the icons have different sizes. This button:
Window could not be moved
Storage editor has menu buttons with only one child. These buttons should be accessible directly. At least when no other options are present. (Simple VM setup)
No option to display the logs / console of the installation in progress.
While installing the spinner at the top has different stroke widths, which looks suboptimal on low DPI screens.
No option to reboot the system from the installer at the end.
While the functionality was present it feels a bit bare and lacking in detail. From the messaging in fedora magazin and this thread i could not get how close to release the web UI is.
The installer should be styled after the desktop environment. Native-feeling UX probably won’t be achievable, but native-looking UI should be.
I don’t think the window should be closable after installation starts. Currently it can be closed in GNOME overview, despite the window itself having no close button.
Disk encryption should display a warning pop-up when the password is weak.
Mount point assignment seems redundant. If the user want to mount manually, they likely also want to partition manually.
I’d say there is a big gap between “automatic storage configuration” and the “storage editor”. In particular, there seems to be no way to review and edit the automatic configuration or to start the editor with the default config .
Also, “biosboot” seems to be a new term here which may or may not refer to /efi on UEFI systems. Users of the editor could benefit from some hints, such as what everything is and what the recommended or minimal sizes are.
The “speedy” wait cursor/spinner can be a bit annoying distracting for such a relatively long process.
When installation has finished, the “To begin using Fedora Linux 42 (Workstation Edition Prerelease), reboot your system.” message appears, along with the Exit to live desktop button. Could be handy to have a Reboot your system button as well.
Cursor (both before the installation as well as after the installation) increases in size when moved over gtk4 apps, if display scale is set higher than 100% (probably not relevant for Anaconda Web UI testing).
About the Reboot your system button, remember that this is a live session. You can reboot the system with the proper button of the desktop environment.
In addition also in the current version of Anaconda, the installer in the live iso doesn’t offer the option to reboot the system, but only a button to close the installer.
My suggestion was an enhancement proposal from a UX perspective. Currently the installer proposes to reboot the system in order to start using the freshly installed environment, yet it provides the button to “Exit to live desktop”. Having the “Reboot your system” button side by side, would make the message and the options more coherent.
Also, first time GNOME users wouldn’t have to search for the Restart button. They will find out about it when taking the tour after restart.
We already discussed this in the team and have the feature prepared for implementation. Not sure if it will be a priority but it shouldn’t be hard to deliver.
Can we PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE have an official and refined stream installation supporting WSL 2 and especially to run in seamless mode for Lenovo X1 / X13 Yoga tablets please?
I have a nice Thinkpad X1 Yoga 6TH Gen 2-in-1 and I’m going insane having to use Hyper-V for school to use Fedora 41 (just started yesterday) when ideally I’d love to run Fedora 41 and future in seamless mode.
Also please consider and emplore Lenovo to continue the 2-in-1 X1/X13 ThinkPad Yoga series to evolve to SnapDragon X-Elite SoC’s
Probably my fault, but in the [advanced] storage editor it is not clear how to create BTRFS volumes.
Free space → create partition → type: BTRFS
If I define simply “/” mount point, returning to installation lead to “Storage requirements not met, you have not defined a root partition”. If I try to define subvolumes, well, they are subvolumes and not top-level ones
Cockpit has a nice log viewer & we might integrate it or something similar in the future - it would make things quite a bit nicer for debugging, especially for remote installs, compared to the current case where people need to either wrestle with TTYs or enable SSH access to retrieve logs.
A couple of other things noticed. These are rather cosmetic suggestions, please ignore if not relevant:
On the confirmation page, when presenting the created partitions (/boot, /boot/efi, /, home in case of automatic partitioning), the subvolumes of the same btrfs partition (/ and home) could be presented with disk name and size information on the first line only, and only mountpoints on multiple lines, i.e. just as lsblk or similar CLI tools are presenting it.
Share disk with other operating system … “dual-boot” → could be: Share disk with other operating system(s) … “multi-boot”.
Installation type is called Share disk with other operating system, yet the same installation type applies also when keeping non-bootable data partitions. E.g. wiping the previous OS installation, but keeping an ext4 data partition. There is no sharing of the disk with another OS, yet the installation is called as such.
Another issue after successful installation with disk encryption: if I enter wrong password twice, the system doesn’t propose a third try. I could reproduce the issue, but hit Esc to see to logs:
Please enter passphrase for disk luks-5da1488-56c9-4cf7-9598-3d024a3f8807:***********
Please enter passphrase for disk luks-5da1488-56c9-4cf7-9598-3d024a3f8807:***********
[FAILED] Failed to start systemd-cryptsetup@luks\5da1488\x2d56c9\x2d4cf7\x2d9598\x2d3d024a3f8807.service - Cryptography Setup for luks-5da1488-56c9-4cf7-9598-30024a3f8807
See 'systemctl status "systemd-cryptsetup@luks\5da1488\x2d56c9\x2d4cf7\x2d9598\x2d3d024a3f8807.service"' for details.
[DEPEND] Dependency failed for cryptsetup.target - Local Encrypted Volumes.
[OK] Reached target sysinit.target - System initialization.
[OK] Reached target basic target - Basic System.
After about a minute, repetition of dracut-initque warning lines regarding starting of timeout scripts appears.
Is this a known issue? I haven’t filed a bug, as I am not sure if this AnacondaWebUI or Rawhide related.
