New Anaconda - BACK, BACK, BACK...

[Adam Williamson]

On 2012-09-13 14:08, Mateusz Marzantowicz wrote:
> On 13.09.2012 22:02, David Lehman wrote:
>> On Thu, 2012-09-13 at 15:00 +0200, Mateusz Marzantowicz wrote:
>>> Hey!
>>>
>>> I've been playing with new Anaconda since Alpha RC2 and I have some
>>> doubts about whole concept of this sub pages with configuration 
>>> options
>>> and jumping around them.
>> You can indulge your doubts or you can adapt. It's up to you. I
>> recommend the latter.
>>
>>> Why, the hell user has to pres BACK each time he made some decision 
>>> or
>>> configuration change? Personally I prefer pressing NEXT because 
>>> this
>>> reminds me what the goal is (working system installation) and that 
>>> I'm
>>> going to reach it sooner or later.
>>>
>>> It looks like some Fedora designers prefer to step backward then 
>>> going
>>> forward to achieve what the installer was created for: Working 
>>> Fedora
>>> system installation.
>> It's just a different model. Instead a long linear progression in 
>> which
>> every user must visit every page/step, you only visit those sections
>> that require your attention. It will save time for most users.
>>
>> You will be pleased to find (in the Beta) that we have changed the
>> wording of some of the buttons to improve clarity.
>>
>>> Please, don't tell me that this is because configuration could be 
>>> done
>>> in parallel and it's for my convenience and to give me the choice 
>>> which
>>> aspect of installation I prefer to configure first. Maybe it's good 
>>> for
>>> advanced users but for dumb average computer guy this introduced 
>>> lot of
>>> instability and is not intuitive.
>> If by "intuitive" you mean "the same as the old interface" then I 
>> must
>> agree. Otherwise, I think you are just trying to hold on to what you
>> know.
>>
>>
>
> Thanks for your reply. I know that new anaconda is different than old
> one. I really have nothing against changes and I think I'll quickly
> adapt. My only concern is new, and in my opinion not so intuitive,
> naming and proceeding convention by which Fedora 18 is installed.
>
> In my typical case, I had to touch every single spoke in the new
> installer, so I gained nothing. Only English speaking people can 
> forget
> about configuring language and keyboard layout. Taking number of
> different time zones in US, we'll quickly find that majority of 
> people
> will need to change this too. No need to say about disk layout which 
> is
> more or less customized or at last reviewed by everyone (excluding
> unattended installations).
>
> Silently allowing people to leave root password not set is also bad 
> idea
> in my opinion. I know what root account is and from previous Fedora
> releases I also know that I either must have a root account or user 
> in
> admin group. But in new installer this is not so clear until 
> firstboot
> is run (where, there is no correspondence to choices from anaconda).
> There is no clear explanation why should I leave root empty and that
> I'll be asked for adding user to admin group later.
>
> Once again, thanks for all great work, you and other anaconda devels
> have done. I'll try to accept as much new features as I can.

In my opinion, even if you have to complete every step, a hub and spoke 
design (which is what newUI is) is fundamentally more appropriate if the 
idea is to allow changes to be done in any order and revised at any 
time. A wizard design is more appropriate if the process needs to be 
done in a specific order and you're not often expected to change things 
once you've picked them.

I find a wizard design with 'back' options pretty awkward, especially 
when changes to particular steps of the wizard can affect other steps. 
It just doesn't suit the process very well. Hub-and-spoke handles this 
much better. It is the case for anaconda - for instance, changes on the 
package selection spoke can affect the partitioning spoke, by changing 
the amount of disk space required for the installation. Wizards are best 
for simple step-by-step processes.

As David said, the anaconda team has already agreed that the term 
'Back' isn't a good one to use for the 'I'm done with this spoke and now 
I want to return to the hub' action, and it'll change for Beta. I think 
the plan is to use 'Done' in most cases, but anyway, it's going to be 
improved. look out for the Beta images to see the change.

The handling of root password setting is also temporary for Alpha, it's 
not the final design. It's just enough to avoid the worst case scenarios 
we noticed for Alpha. Originally there was no root password spoke at 
all, but the problem with that is that there's no firstboot and hence no 
pre-login user creation step on non-desktop installs; the root spoke is 
basically just a workaround for the case of a non-desktop install, so 
you can set a root password and actually be able to login to such a 
system after install. For Beta and Final the intent is to handle the 
various possible cases more elegantly, though I don't know the details.

In general, don't assume the design of anything in newUI in Alpha is 
exactly how it's intended to be in Final. If you think you see a problem 
in the design, by all means report it, but don't be under the impression 
that the existing design is actually the final design and consequently 
the anaconda team are a bunch of bozos for doing it that way. There are 
quite a few things in Alpha anaconda that are known to be temporary 
patch jobs, not the intended final design. (Custom partitioning is 
another.)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net