We've been treating this page as something of a lost cause, because of the progress bar at the bottom that has never ever worked (it used to treat all of package installation as one stage, and nowadays it seems to start out already at 100% full), and the banner advert that gets cut off (when I tested it the other day I saw something like "Rhythmbox can play your mus"). So some design work would certainly be appreciated. My requests would be:

• Drop the progress bar unless it can be made to actually work properly. Just show a spinner instead.
• Drop the silly advert banners
• No hot dogs

I guess an Ubuntu-style slideshow could perhaps work well.

Jimmac's suggestion, perhaps outside of this request, is to have a fixed window size for Anaconda because the maximized window mode doesn't work very well design-wise. Something to put on the agenda for the meeting with Anaconda people.

We revisited the idea of a slideshow and Jakub has come up with a simple screen which would require less development efforts and less maintenance.

I try to keep a pulse on problems Fedora users are reporting on social media and forums, and I'm seeing quite a lot of people confused by the lack of user account creation in the installer.

Part of that might be from this screen still saying "configuration" even though there isn't any configuration to do. But, it makes me think that we would benefit from having the ability to put some basic information here, even if it's not in the form of banners.

Part of that might be from this screen still saying "configuration" even though there isn't any configuration to do.

At least fixing this would be a good start.

@eischmann, since you've been working with the anaconda team on this, could you provide an update please?

CC: @duffy

Hi what do you need from me? Did you meet w the anaconda team last year?

OK, six months later....

I CCed you just because I know you work on Anaconda design. I have no idea if any Anaconda meetings happened.

@eischmann, since you've been working with the anaconda team on this, could you provide an update please?

@jkonecny or @vponcova might know if something happen.

I suppose the main issue is the expanse of grey with the progress bar awkwardly floating in the middle of the window?

I'm not sure I understand the comments about the progress bar not working. Can someone explain that?

There are various ways to address the layout issue and I'd be interested in participating in a design discussion about that.

Hi, as you can see in the screenshot above, this screen looks a little different now. We have moved all spokes to the summary hub, so the screen shows only the progress bar and has the title "Installation Progress". The UI changes are based on suggestions from duffy.

The support for banners is removed at this moment. The banners were too small for the new screen and broken for a long time (see the bug 1573535). We can add the support back if requested, but nobody seems to miss them. I would like to point out, that the images for banners require maintanance and the Anaconda team is not their maintainer.

We know about the issue with the progress bar and plan to fix it, but it is not so easy.

Calamares/Ubuntu-style slideshow banners that are large, square, and in the center would make more sense than what we were doing before. It's what Anaconda used to do too. We can use that real estate to tell people about interesting things that they can experience in their installed system.

I'm pretty sure that we can get some artwork for slideshow banners if the support was present. Let's be better than "meh".

It'd be great if the screen looked at least like our boot/offline updates screen: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/BootProgress

In the current state the screen doesn't look good at all.

I'm not sure I understand the comments about the progress bar not working. Can someone explain that?

This has been broken since 2013 at least, maybe earlier. "Installing Software" is treated as one step in the progress bar, so once the installation is nearly complete the progress bar is still near the very beginning. Then it just jumps all the way to the end. It doesn't get anywhere close to approximating actual installation progress.

Screenshots attached. Once "installing software" completes, anaconda is almost done. Everything after that point happens almost instantly, except for initramfs generation which takes a few seconds.

I'm pretty sure that we can get some artwork for slideshow banners if the support was present. Let's be better than "meh".

As someone who has been involved with mantaining various marketing and graphic design assets, I can say that this stuff isn't simple and doesn't just magically appear. From a branding perspective it's important that it looks good, reads good, and stays up to date in the future. That takes work and an ongoing commitment.

We could investigate low maintenance options, but it does remain a question of whose responsibility it is going to be to test and maintain the assets for every release.

I'm not sure I understand the comments about the progress bar not working. Can someone explain that?

This has been broken since 2013 at least, maybe earlier. "Installing Software" is treated as one step in the progress bar, so once the installation is nearly complete the progress bar is still near the very beginning. Then it just jumps all the way to the end. It doesn't get anywhere close to approximating actual installation progress.

It's important to have progress indication for a long-running process like this. If the progress indication isn't accurate, it should be fixed, or at least improved.

I support either keeping the banners refreshed, or deprecating them. Would it be helpful to put together a subgroup of the Workstation WG? e.g. 2-3 WG members, and 2-3 marketing and graphics folks? And for this subgroup to meet at least once every couple of years to do the refresh?

Side note:
The Anaconda banners are there since the dominance of hard drives. Install times are much shorter with SSD and NVMe drives; I expect the work proposed on devel@ for F32 (which may slip to F33) related to squashfs images and how they are installed will improve this even more.

In my own out of band testing, I can get the replication component down to 16 seconds. Total install time: partition, replication, initramfs and bootloader stuff, could plausibly be under 1 minute for most users. That's for Live installs of course; net installs could be all over the map.

(BTW completely OT, but i18n UX improvements should also be made to Anaconda
to simplify UI for the long language and keyboard lists: more in the style of gnome-control-center.
See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1158370
I can open a separate ticket if we want.)

More dialogue with the installer team is a good idea.

This issue is approaching its three-year anniversary, and I don't think we've seen much progress except for removing the banners.

What else do we want to see happen here?

This issue is approaching its three-year anniversary, and I don't think we've seen much progress except for removing the banners.

What else do we want to see happen here?

What I've been wanting to do for a while is an initial round of design work for the installation experience, specifically around integration between the desktop session and Anaconda. I was hoping that this could be a good way to get the ball rolling on Anaconda changes that we'd like to see.

So I see a path towards this issue, but it seems a way off and I have so far not managed to clear the time required to move forward.

This issue is obsoleted by the ongoing Anaconda redesign.