Linux

Since we’d likely have to rewrite a lot of the frontend anyway, we took another approach [an approach different to keep using GTK] and have taken advantage of the modularization efforts to retool the frontend to have a web-based interface instead. The Cockpit team has been providing a web-based interface for Linux systems for managing systems for many years in the Cockpit web console, so it made sense to reuse Cockpit as a base and its web-based widget set, PatternFly, as a starting point for the next generation of Anaconda too.

By-the-way: We’re using Firefox to render the UI when you’re installing locally. (There’s no Chromium or Electron involved.)

Web-based benefits

While it’s not a native toolkit like GTK, using a web based UI does have several benefits:

• It’s easier to update and maintain versus a traditional desktop application
• We now use Cockpit’s testing frameworks to test Anaconda’s web UI
• It’s easier to adapt to future changes
• It enables more community contributions, as it “lowers the bar” for know-how, as there are many more developers familiar with web development than GTK development
• We can extend it to interactively install a remote machine using Anaconda from another computer’s Web browser in the future