Please stop shoehorning everything into HTML/CSS/JS

Posted Nov 13, 2024 6:43 UTC (Wed) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641)
In reply to: Please stop shoehorning everything into HTML/CSS/JS by intelfx
Parent article: Anaconda’s new "Web UI" (Fedora Magazine)

I usually install Debian, haven't touched Fedora in a while, but what is the use of a GUI installer ?

In Debian the steps, everything on the screen is the same in the text UI-based installer.

Debian basically has a questions/decision tree system for the user to answer to know what actions to do, you can use a GUI or text UI or even CLI-like UI to ask/answer the same questions (or use a bootstrap 'preseed' config file to skip the question/answer).

I think when it comes to web interfaces, I think it would maybe be useful to have a web interface to help make a preseed file to help with automating installing lots of systems.

[1] https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/example-preseed.txt

Please stop shoehorning everything into HTML/CSS/JS

Posted Nov 13, 2024 12:42 UTC (Wed) by m4rtink (guest, #95458) [Link]

>I usually install Debian, haven't touched Fedora in a while, but what is the use of a GUI installer ?

Anaconda also has a TUI - it can be seen on this older screenshot from Fedora Magazine for example:
https://fedoramagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/tui...

It is also possible to fully automate the installation using kickstart:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora/f36/install-g...

Other things can be configured via boot options:
https://anaconda-installer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/boot-options.html

Or configuration files:
https://anaconda-installer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration-files.html

GUI is only one of the possible ways of interacting with the installer. :)

Please stop shoehorning everything into HTML/CSS/JS

Posted Nov 13, 2024 14:38 UTC (Wed) by smcv (subscriber, #53363) [Link]

> what is the use of a GUI installer ?

The reason Debian eventually gained one is: internationalization. For languages that are written with a small alphabet (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek) it's fairly easy to set up a TUI in the console character grid, but for languages with lots of characters (notably Chinese/Japanese/Korean) or languages that rely on letter-shaping (Arabic), you really need a fully-featured graphics library to be able to draw legible text.

Making new users feel more at home ("this looks difficult, like a thing for hackers" vs. "this looks a bit like Windows/macOS, how hard can it be?") is a side benefit of offering a GUI installer, but quite an important one IMO: first impressions do matter.