There are a number of posts noting the difficulty of finding the partition button.
And here is the response of the Anaconda team. Are we loosing the control of our Fedora installations? - #49 by garrett
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So isn’t this the sane default. Formating it the way fedora suggested so it behaves as expected? Once user has a need for custom anything, doesn’t strike me as beginner.
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@pg-tips nails on the head exactly what I would have said in response to that post. It’s more phone design KDE-isms and GNOME-isms taking over. The abandoning of the “desktop metaphor” for some hodge podge of an all-in-one design that ends up not fitting anything. I don’t use GNOME or KDE on a phone, there is space on the screen, stop sticking everything behind “hamburger menus” and “ellipses menus”.
There is a reason Steve Jobs was so against having an all-in-one DE. Sure you can take design choices from one or the other and implement them in one or the other. BUT MAKE THEM MAKE SENSE. Hiding the partitioner in an “ellipses menu” along with items generally found in the help menu does not make sense in any way shape or form.
In fact we have a massive thread on the KDE forums about this very problem right now.
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Slightly unrelated, but I love how a lot of posts like these have the most conspiracy sounding title ever.
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It reminds me of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.
Worth noting Steve Jobs wasn’t a designer, he was a businessman.
And I still would love to remind people that the design can always change. In fact, everyone can propose alternative design (as long as it also won’t contradict above-mentioned statement by Anaconda contributor)
And he made the final decisions on what went out. Apple only went to flat design after Jobs died (where previously they had used Skeuomorph) and Forstall resigned not long after. Ive took over interface design at that point. And Ive is a horribly boring designer.
It shouldn’t have been buried there in the first place.
Business people making decisions on UI is exactly how Apple got Liquid Glass (I would call it differently, but I doubt this forum allows this kind of words).
I’m sorry, but did you read his (i.e. Anaconda developer’s) comment? It was buried exactly because it was a trap for average user. You can design a UI that can protect both average user and better shows partition editor.
If a partitioner is a trap for an “average” user, then by Christ standards have slipped since I was an average user.
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You realise most people have absolutely no idea how manual partitioning even works? Sorry that most people aren’t as smart as you.
Quoting relevant part of Garett’s comment:
We have done usability studies, and found that people accidentally found themselves in the advanced disk layout editor (provided by Cockpit Storage) and would fail to be able to install Fedora. That’s why the advanced partitioning is in the menu, as an “escape hatch” for non-standard installations. It’s also a dangerous option if you don’t know what you’re doing and do have data on your disk already, as it operates in instant-apply manner (due to technical reasons). Basically: You should treat it as a separate tool, like using GParted, but it’s shipping with Fedora.
Those people can stick to the defaults without needing to hide the ability to change the defaults.
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In this context “hiding” means literally clicking one button.
A lot of people, myself included, couldn’t find the method used to change the defaults during install. If that’s not the definition of hidden, how do you define hidden?
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To quote myself:
You seem to forget you are a nerd. Average dunce nut needs that handholding
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Handholding is setting reasonable defaults. You can even put in a warning when changing them.
What’s the danger though for a new user in letting them easily choose ext4 or xfs or whatever instead of btrfs?
The danger is in choice paralysis - scaring off new users because the don’t understand what all those choices mean.
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Is this choice paralysis a real thing? Or is it imaginary?
BTW, as I’ve been looking into btrfs now that I’m using it, is seems that it causes some issues for gamers, so ext4 probably would have been the better default anyway for new users.
Not sure if it was Anaconda, but I remember old GNU/Linux installers that would say “If unsure, use the default.” - if choice paralysis is real, why wouldn’t that be good enough?
Everyone commenting here has their brain wired in such a way that they can deal with technical choice.
The paralysis very real for those used to buyOS or Windoze.
They can learn though, lets help them in.
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I don’t see how taking away the ability to configure the system to their needs is letting them in.