Installer needs major upgrade !

[FishboyFive]

Why does Ubuntu not use the beautiful installer fedora 19 uses

I tried fedora 19 yesterday and my jaw dropped its amazing . Ubuntu should really really look into the installer it is very professional looking and for once does not look / feel cheap.

[buzzmandt]

beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
I think ubuntu (kubuntu for me) has a beautiful installer and it does exactly what i need it to do.

[kansasnoob]

beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
I think ubuntu (kubuntu for me) has a beautiful installer and it does exactly what i need it to do.

+1 !

To go a bit further ............ w/o more specific details regarding what did or didn't work we're clueless about how to reproduce any problem you encountered.

[deadflowr]

Does this belong in +1?

[grahammechanical]

does this belong in +1?

no.

Hey, you, get off of my cloud. (Rolling Stones)

[lisati]

Time for a coffee!

Thread moved to The Cafe.

[monkeybrain2012]

Haven't tried Fedora 19 yet, but Fedora 18's installer is a bloody mess. If Ubuntu is to make a new installer I suppose there will be lots of complaints that it messes up something in an interim release just like F18. :)
Having said that I do think they should clean up some bugs in the installer, which seems to have been around for several releases like hanging or being very slow in the beginning, which has nothing to do with UEFI. I would consider not being able to run the installer properly a show stopper bug.

[mamamia88]

Who cares what the installer looks like as long as it's functional and easy enough to understand?

[AdamWill]

fishboyfive: thanks for the kind words, but I'm not sure Ubuntu would be best served by Fedora's installer necessarily :) It's certainly not a straightforward thing to simply transfer an installer from one distro to another, either.

Ubuntu's installer and Fedora's are pretty different in approach and functionality. Ubuntu's is fairly limited in functionality in comparison to Fedora's, but this allows it to be rather a lot simpler. Both approaches work quite well for their target audiences. Ubuntu's is a wizard-style installer which aims to provide just enough configurability to allow all Ubuntu target users to get a basic Ubuntu install deployed interactively. Fedora's is a giant whizzy spinning thing that can run attended or unattended, install from about sixty-three different types of remote repository, install to iSCSI, multipath and other exotic storage devices, and probably make you a cup of tea if you only get the parameters right; but the level of complexity inevitably renders the UI somewhat more complex and means we have more bugs to deal with. I think Ubuntu's pretty well-served by its current installer and wouldn't gain an awful lot from using Fedora's instead, given Ubuntu's target audience, and Fedora similarly would not be well-served by Ubuntu's installer as it would be too limited in functionality.

[Cheesehead]

Ubuntu should really really look into the installer it is very professional looking and for once does not look / feel cheap.

The Ubuntu Installer Team (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Installer/Development) welcomes your code and animation contributions. It's only as good as we contribute.

+1 to AdamWill's excellent comment.

[FishboyFive]

i was mostly talking about the GUI of fedora 19 installer the look of it would really make ubuntu that much more polished.

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Installation_Guide/images/preinstallhub/preinstall_hub.png

[Copper Bezel]

Hmm. Ubuntu's installer takes the user through each of these steps in sequence, which is consistent with the setup process in commercial operating systems, and I think there's a sound logic to it - the user has to make each of those decisions, so presenting them linearly doesn't cost any time, but making them navigable from top-level like your screenshot adds a layer of complexity (users have theoption of navigating non-linearly) and cognitive load.

The setup screen above certainly is more attractive than what a user sees while installing Ubuntu, although it could use some color. Most of what makes it attractive is its simplicity. But the extra UI elements in Ubuntu's installer are not superfluous. Ubuntu ships with only one desktop environment, and its installer resembles the interface provided in that environment, giving users a taste of what the OS will look and feel like and giving a seamless transition into the environment itself. Is the screenshot above a capture of a windowed application, or does it take the full screen space? If it's a fullscreen installer, then it's making up its own visual language that won't be consistent with any one environment the user opts to install.

Ubuntu also gets to make use of the time while installation steps are in progress to ask setup questions and offer previews of features in Ubuntu. That is, while setup steps are in progress, the system is actually installing. The screenshot implies that Fedora asks for setup steps first, then begins installation. The total time for the installation would be greater, and since Fedora just doesn't have core features to show off, I'd think that the (admittedly minimal) benefit of Ubuntu's preview slideshow would be lost, too.

So I can see why Fedora uses a different tact from Ubuntu's, but I think that from what you've presented so far, it's not because one approach is better or worse, but simply because Fedora and Ubuntu are two very different operating systems with two different sets of goals.

Am I making any wrong assumptions so far?