For our booth at FOSDEM we had some hardware to show off the latest and greatest GNOME. I brought the tablet I got from the Desktop Summit. In order to prepare it I installed Fedora 20 which comes with a nice and shiny installer. I found a few issues and glitches and will present then them in the course of this post.
It worked well enough, but it has a few glitches. One of them is that GNOME apparently does not detect that it is running on hardware which does not have a keyboard. So it was a bit to enter a password for a wifi when there is no (soft) keyboard…
Some incoherences exist. One of them is that it shows the “Next” button on the bottom right. Which is what I’d expect. But sometimes it also asks the user to press a button on the upper left. I didn’t even remotely expect having to press a button on the “back” side of the screen in order to continue installation.
It was very nice though that it seems to offer installation along an existing operating system *and* full disk encryption. The Ubuntu installer can install you a fully encrypted system nicely, but only if you install Ubuntu on the whole disk. The Fedora installer seems to manage that nicely.
As it seems to be normal nowadays, installation starts even though you haven’t provided all the necessary information yet. That is very convenient and have a much fast installation experience.
Another coherence issue is on the user dialogue. I can actually guess what the thinking was when designing these menus. You have this “overview” screen as seen above and then you “dive” into the sub menus. I expected a more linearly following set of menus. Why would I need return to the overview menu at all? I claim that it is much easier to just continue, not to go forth and back… Anyway, a real bug is visible: Mnemonics are not formatted properly.
The user dialogue, while being at it, seemed to have forced me to enter a strong password. I just wanted to install a system for a demo machine. Probably not the usual usecase, but annoying enough if it doesn’t work smoothly. I think I found out later that I needed to double press the “Next” button (labelled “done” and being placed in the area of the screen where I’d expect “back” buttons to be).
Turns out, that the same thing happened with the root password, which really annoyed me. Especially as the soft keyboard doesn’t really allow for convenient input of complicated characters.
But then I discovered something. On the very bottom there something weirdly coloured. It was a notification for the current menu. Why on earth complain about the password I’ve entered on the very bottom when the widget is on the very top? That was surprising and confusing. Plus, the warning itself was not very visible due to the onscreen keyboard obstructing the view. So I guess it’d be smarter to not have the warnings there.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised how smooth the installation experience was. It could, of course, have been better, but all in all it was quite good. I finished in less than half and hour. Too bad that I didn’t know that neither Eye of GNOME nor Epiphany were installed by default.
