Hello, the installer suggested that I post my feedback here on the forum.
The process was mostly OK, but not as smooth as it could have been. I was setting up the computer to dual-boot together with Windows, and certainly Windows contributed a lot to the challenges, but I’ll focus on ways that Fedora can improve the process.
- I used the Fedora Media Writer tool to write the ISO (Fedora KDE) to my USB drive. That mostly worked well, and I appreciate the tool. However, I ran into the "4.8% install validation" bug. So I had to re-create the drive and make sure not to allow Windows an opportunity to write any files to it. That was quite troublesome, especially as the drive needs to be inserted when powering on to boot from it, but it’s easy to miss the narrow opportunity to access the BIOS / boot-order menu before the system automatically boots into Windows. If there’s anything the Media Writer can do to set the drive to read-only or otherwise prevent Windows from corrupting it, it would relieve a pain point.
- On starting up from the USB image, Fedora displays a window with an icon-shaped button to install to the disk. You have to click that button exactly once; a password prompt briefly appears and then disappears automatically, and there is little other feedback that it’s been clicked successfully, and then several seconds elapse before any other reaction occurs to the button press. If you click it multiple times, as I did after seeing that prompt flash past, you can get into trouble with multiple copies of the Anaconda window all appearing at once.
- When installing alongside another OS like windows, the Fedora installer offers a checkbox option to “reclaim additional space”. There is no further description of what that option does, and very little information about it can be found when Googling. I still don’t know exactly what it does, but apparently it might wipe parts of my Windows install? That would be a bad thing to do by accident. “Reclaim additional space” sounds so innocent; it sounds like it will merely automatically use all of the unallocated space, or something. It would be nice to provide some explanatory text, explaining why someone would or would not want to select this option.
- The installer also asks me, as part of the setup process, whether I want to create a root account. I personally know enough that I don’t need this explained, but to a less-technical user, this is another option that makes them wonder if they’re making an irreversible decision. It would be nice for the installer to at least mention that “if you don’t do this now, you can do it later”, so that worrying about whether they want to add a root user or not doesn’t slow down the installation process.
Other than that, it all worked pretty well. Thank you for making the experience as smooth as it was!