[virt-tools-list] [virt-manager PATCH v4] Redesign OS distro selection UI to be faster to use

[Daniel P. Berrangé]

On Tue, May 01, 2018 at 12:14:55PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
> On 05/01/2018 07:51 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
> > 
> 
> Thanks for the reviews everyone, I pushed this now, with just a small
> change removing some pylint warnings.
> 
> So I see the popover window constraint thing that Pavel mentioned, which
> is apparently the only option for popovers on x11 but wayland can put
> the popover outside the toplevel window. To handle this the create
> wizard size request had to be changed and now the window is all
> stretched out and off center and looks dumb.

Are there particular pages in the wizard you think look bad ? 

I actually thought it is better with the larger size. With the smaller
min size, every time you press the back/forward button the window jumps
around in size. This is painful because if you press "back" once, the
window shrinks so your mouse is now above "cancel", making it pretty
unpleasant to use. The larger size hasn't entirely solved this, as it
still jumps a bit in height if certain expandable sections are expanded
but there's much less jumping in general.

> What does a popover give us now besides the cute arrow? Seems like we
> can go back to either making this a combo box or a popup window, neither
> have the window constraint

For the popover vs the combo box, it allows more flexible UI design. The
popover lets you control size of the list, and include extra widgets such
as the search hint & the filter checkboxes.

The popover is easier to manage that the popup window, because Gtk
will automatically figure out the best position to place the popup
at relative to the widget we designate the owner.

Regards,
Daniel
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