[virt-tools-list] [PATCH 3/3] Redesign OS distro selection UI to be faster to use

[Cole Robinson]

I pushed patch #1 and #2, thanks

On 04/04/2018 09:35 AM, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> The current OS distro selection UI is fairly cumbersome to use. First
> you need to decide on a variant, then decide a distro and then look for
> the version you want. The list is filtered by default so only a subset
> of OS are displayed. So for less common distros you'll then need to
> start again and tell it to show all OS to try to find the one you want.
> 
> The core problem is that we have an incredibly large list and want to
> make it easy for the user to find a specific entry. The modern UI
> paradigm for this problem is to provide interactive search with
> live updated results. The current UI does provide an interactive search
> facility on the OS version results, but you still have to first select a
> variant to be able to use the search which is unhelpful.
> 
> This patch attempts to better apply the search UI design to the OS selection
> problem. We get rid of the notion of variants, distros and version, and
> provide a single text entry box in which the user can type a few letters
> of the OS name. As they type, a popover displays the matching results
> filtered on OS name. By default end of life OS will be hidden, so in
> general there will only be a small handful of results left after just
> typing a few characters. This makes it very quick to find and select the
> desired OS, without needing to provide a mutli-step navigation hierarchy.
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1464306
> 
> Signed-off-by: Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange at redhat.com>

Nice, this definitely seems better to me, and avoids having to worry
about adding categories like Pino's patch.

Pino, since you worked on this UI before too, what are your thoughts?

Some ideas/thoughts:

* get rid of the label entirely and just have the search field take up
the whole horizontal space.
* libosinfo eol data needs to be expanded... type in 'linux' and see
every mandriva/mageia release, altlinux release, etc. maybe it can be
made mandatory in the schema to avoid missing this info
* typing in 'rhel' returns no results... maybe we need to match on short
id as well
* some placeholder text like 'type here to search...', and/or when
autodetect is selected but before detection we fill in with 'Autodetect'
placeholder
* say a user types in 'mint', no results pop up (expectedly), they are
not sure where to go next. maybe we always show results for 'generic' or
similar. I think there's bigger work needed here though, like having a
'latest-linux' meta-os that generally supports all virtio devices

Thanks,
Cole