1. I understand about disks, volumes, partitions, filesystems, and I want to build it all up. 2. I have goals (like redundancy) and would like to tell the installer to give me that from whatever resources are available.
The former works very well for sysadmins and Linux enthusiasts (the people likely to be quad-booting or whatever), but our research showed it was really painful for basically everyone else -- so we have a UI focused on the latter.
That said, we definitely want Fedora to be appealing to the former class as well. There is an Anaconda feature in the works to add a more-traditional partition manager option as well. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/AnacondaBlivetGUI (It's currently targetted for F26, but I'm not sure if it's going to make that with the current schedule.)
The Blivet GUI looks like it could fix many of these issues.
My issues with it are from a HCI perspective;
- the Done button is context sensitive which is rubbish.
- Select Automatically Configure Partitioning and it will go back to the Installation summary
- Select "I Will configure Partitioning" it will go into the partitioner.
- The Available space is across all disks not on a per disk basis.
- It's not immediately clear whether the plus or minus buttons in the partitioner will create partitions, delete partitions, or adding them to the installation selection.
Debian's installer is excellent, in my experience.
At every step of the partitioning/volume management process you should be able to quickly undo or back out of your selection. only when the user is happy with the structure or layout should any change be committed, likewise there should be no ambiguity in the functionality of any aspect of it's operation.
After all it is your data you may be potentially blowing away.
It's been a while since I last installed Debian, so I can't comment on the installation experience there though I can't recall running into any issues. It was a perfectly forgettable experience. The Ubuntu installer was also excellent, and the partitioning aspect was both clean and clear when creating a custom setup.