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Important Announcement for the TrueNAS Community.
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FreeNAS 11.2-RELEASE has arrived!
- Thread starter Kris Moore
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-fun-
Contributor
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- Oct 27, 2015
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- 171
Well, the upgrade went well and I can manage jails from the GUI (didnt't try in detail yet).
BUT
This new UI is still such a disappointment. In the "FreeNAS 11.2 new GUI suggestions and discussion thread" from January I wrote:
I come back to see that this main issue hasn't changed.
If anyone is looking towards the 11.2 release for the new UI who was turned away from this in the 11.1 release, he can probably just skip this release.
Browsing snapshots for example: Sure this list would't fit into one screen anyway. But the columns! The long snapshot names get 3 out of 18 centimeters of screen space on my screen (yes I did measure) and the most part of the names is clipped. This means the most important information is just not shown. Instead there are numerous columns showing a few characters only plus much much much white space. Ok, resize columns should do. Just it doesn't, this seems to be a joke feature: Pulling the column separator to rightmost edge of the screen will not make the column wide enough. So the information just cannot be shown in any way. Even if resizing helped: This screen does not remember the resizing of the columns. Bottomline: Effectively unusable for all practical purposes.
Scrolling: Sometimes it is not obvious in which area a user needs to position a mouse pointer to be able to scroll. There are just numerous nested areas in approx. 50 shades of gray. At least it works in the innermost one. In the boot environments view I have several nested areas each showing scroll bars. The information is arranged as in the legacy UI, but now all of this does not fit into one screen anymore.
Clipped contents: Part of the screen is clipped at the lower end in many views, like in System / General. Only upper half of the buttons is shown, the rest is overlaid by the console window.
The storage view: At least now there is a hierarchical display. This is however not something to carol away about. For displaying hierarchically structured data this is the minimum requirement. But the rest! Line breaks in columns too small to display their data resulting in a completely broken layout. Aggravated by the fact that the table has no column or line borders, also no shading to distinguish separate lines (admittedly difficult in a hierarchical view).
The dashboard: While it has some added value (I like disk temperatures for example) it is not configurable. The first block of information may be useful for professional users having to administrate very many machines. But for home users this is a complete waste of space. Home users will not need to be shown their FreeNAS machines' hostnames, memory, processor and FreeNAS version. Being able to configure the shown information (what and where) would help. I recommend a look at the dashboard of pfsense how this can be done.
Waste of space like everywhere else. All of the informations could be shown much more compact. What use is a dashboard if I need to scroll through 4(!!) screen pages instead of having everything in one screen! Even the charts: The block below the information is nearly 50% of the overall needed space. This is > 3cm on my screen filled with nearly nothing. Again the pfsense dashboard is a suitable reference for a modern UI with an adequate information density.
Missing information:
But this is not a full review.
For me the UI still does not constitute more than a technological preview. Good to still have the legacy UI.
My opinions are based not only on personal impressions as a user. I'm responsible for UI development teams with modern Angular based UIs for commercial customers in my job and although I do not claim to be a UX design expert myself a lot of know how sticks.
BUT
This new UI is still such a disappointment. In the "FreeNAS 11.2 new GUI suggestions and discussion thread" from January I wrote:
I come back to see that this main issue hasn't changed.
If anyone is looking towards the 11.2 release for the new UI who was turned away from this in the 11.1 release, he can probably just skip this release.
Browsing snapshots for example: Sure this list would't fit into one screen anyway. But the columns! The long snapshot names get 3 out of 18 centimeters of screen space on my screen (yes I did measure) and the most part of the names is clipped. This means the most important information is just not shown. Instead there are numerous columns showing a few characters only plus much much much white space. Ok, resize columns should do. Just it doesn't, this seems to be a joke feature: Pulling the column separator to rightmost edge of the screen will not make the column wide enough. So the information just cannot be shown in any way. Even if resizing helped: This screen does not remember the resizing of the columns. Bottomline: Effectively unusable for all practical purposes.
Scrolling: Sometimes it is not obvious in which area a user needs to position a mouse pointer to be able to scroll. There are just numerous nested areas in approx. 50 shades of gray. At least it works in the innermost one. In the boot environments view I have several nested areas each showing scroll bars. The information is arranged as in the legacy UI, but now all of this does not fit into one screen anymore.
Clipped contents: Part of the screen is clipped at the lower end in many views, like in System / General. Only upper half of the buttons is shown, the rest is overlaid by the console window.
The storage view: At least now there is a hierarchical display. This is however not something to carol away about. For displaying hierarchically structured data this is the minimum requirement. But the rest! Line breaks in columns too small to display their data resulting in a completely broken layout. Aggravated by the fact that the table has no column or line borders, also no shading to distinguish separate lines (admittedly difficult in a hierarchical view).
The dashboard: While it has some added value (I like disk temperatures for example) it is not configurable. The first block of information may be useful for professional users having to administrate very many machines. But for home users this is a complete waste of space. Home users will not need to be shown their FreeNAS machines' hostnames, memory, processor and FreeNAS version. Being able to configure the shown information (what and where) would help. I recommend a look at the dashboard of pfsense how this can be done.
Waste of space like everywhere else. All of the informations could be shown much more compact. What use is a dashboard if I need to scroll through 4(!!) screen pages instead of having everything in one screen! Even the charts: The block below the information is nearly 50% of the overall needed space. This is > 3cm on my screen filled with nearly nothing. Again the pfsense dashboard is a suitable reference for a modern UI with an adequate information density.
Missing information:
- In a dashboard for the pools I would expect information about scheduled scrubs, status and timestamp of last and next scrub, chart of free space over time.
- I consider the network bandwidth a useful information but there needs to be a chart of bandwidth usage over time.
- Why isn't there dashboard information about jails and virtual machines?
But this is not a full review.
For me the UI still does not constitute more than a technological preview. Good to still have the legacy UI.
My opinions are based not only on personal impressions as a user. I'm responsible for UI development teams with modern Angular based UIs for commercial customers in my job and although I do not claim to be a UX design expert myself a lot of know how sticks.
diedrichg
Wizard
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- Dec 4, 2012
- Messages
- 1,319
Please submit this as a bug report so that these issues can be fixed.
-fun-
Contributor
- Joined
- Oct 27, 2015
- Messages
- 171
I will do this. First tickets are #63618, #63609, #63600, #63591. More to follow.
jerryjharrison
Explorer
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2014
- Messages
- 99
Updated from 11.1-U6 with no issues. I had 2 iocage jails that had been manually created under 11.1-U5 that had started giving errors due to the EOL of the underlying OS. Once my upgrade had been completed, I upgraded each of the jails using the iocage upgrade command, and all is working perfectly. Great job.
- Joined
- May 28, 2011
- Messages
- 10,994
Submit a Bug/Feature Request.
ThreeDee
Guru
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2013
- Messages
- 700
Installed from scratch and then loaded my saved config file .. looking and running good now. Had some minor hiccups with setting up Plex in iocage but searching the forums got me up and running getting metadata for my stuff. Thanks for all your guys's/gals's hard work!
I have confirmed the issue is not related to USB key fault.
There appears that FreeBSD bootloader and Gen8 don't get along very well. There are few posts around Gen8 and booting 11.2 in the freebsd forums
As a 25 year IT pro, I don't believe "submit this as a bug" suffices as a reaction towards the breathtakenly bad new GUI, since it is clearly lacking in every way. Going through the new GUI, feature after feature, the new GUI is nothing more than a beta, and not even that. The "new GUI" is not only bad, but lacking in so many ways, and it's documentation, even though it's inherited from the old GUI, is so idiotic, that I cannot believe these guys. Here is an example:
Which sane person would not understand that the size format is missing? Not here, not even in the faq, does IX system think that, if they're gonna provide an explanation, it may be appropriate to mention in which format the size should be given. If it was limited to this, it might be ok. You would eventually learn that IX systems think it's natural to write '2147483648' to annotate 2 GB. Not sure if it's possible to write "2 GB", but that's not the point. If you provide an explanation, the format is necessarily a part of that explanation.
However, when criticizing, there will always be a "fan-boy" making the point that the product, and the documentation, is not for "novices". Take a look at this:
In this example, who are IX systems addressing? The "freeNAS guru"? Not really. Stating the obvious seems to be the highest priority. Btw, this is a random pick, similarities are found in every part of the documentation.
So many points could be made about this new GUI, and it's new documentation, and it's old (and after so many years, you would expect it to be so much better), that I will abandon FreeNAS after a short time of use. There are far better alternatives.
danb35
Hall of Famer
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- Aug 16, 2011
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- 15,504
Translation: I can't be bothered to offer constructive suggestions, so I'll just complain.
Thanks for joining to post this. Don't let the door hit you.
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I don't want to participate in a flame war.
However, I agree in spirit that the devs might want to take a look at how other, more consumer-oriented, systems are interfacing with the customer. Not to copy them but rather to figure out what parts of a UI make sense and what parts do not. Approach things from the point of view of someone who didn't grow up with FreeNAS or the CLI from 20 years ago. Conventions that made sense then (such as using "0" to show no quota limits) are simply outdated in a modern UI.
I am surprised that prominent UI features like CPU temperature can show as 0*C in the new UI but show correctly in the old one.... especially on a mini XL board, i.e. the kind of hardware that I expect iXsystems would test in-house for consistency / compliance. Ditto my issues with the console image being cut off three digits to the left, but only after the boot screen. This stuff shouldn't make it past quality control.
On the other hand, I am delighted that the new UI shows hard drive temperatures, something that was only possible via the CLI in the legacy UI days. Similarly, I find the new process of building a pool more intuitive than the past (esp. when it comes to building a pool with cache, ZIL, etc.). I continue to be disappointed that creating a Z3 pool requires a manual setup, however.
So I see some progress and I hope the devs will keep pushing the new UI (and the underlying infrastructure) in a positive direction.
However, I agree in spirit that the devs might want to take a look at how other, more consumer-oriented, systems are interfacing with the customer. Not to copy them but rather to figure out what parts of a UI make sense and what parts do not. Approach things from the point of view of someone who didn't grow up with FreeNAS or the CLI from 20 years ago. Conventions that made sense then (such as using "0" to show no quota limits) are simply outdated in a modern UI.
I am surprised that prominent UI features like CPU temperature can show as 0*C in the new UI but show correctly in the old one.... especially on a mini XL board, i.e. the kind of hardware that I expect iXsystems would test in-house for consistency / compliance. Ditto my issues with the console image being cut off three digits to the left, but only after the boot screen. This stuff shouldn't make it past quality control.
On the other hand, I am delighted that the new UI shows hard drive temperatures, something that was only possible via the CLI in the legacy UI days. Similarly, I find the new process of building a pool more intuitive than the past (esp. when it comes to building a pool with cache, ZIL, etc.). I continue to be disappointed that creating a Z3 pool requires a manual setup, however.
So I see some progress and I hope the devs will keep pushing the new UI (and the underlying infrastructure) in a positive direction.
danb35
Hall of Famer
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No flame war here; the ignore list works very nicely in that regard. But iX has repeatedly said that this iteration of the new GUI is primarily serving as a transition to the new framework, while keeping the underlying workflows pretty much unchanged (though there are some changes--all recurrent tasks are now under the Tasks menu item, rather than being split between Storage and Tasks). Future releases, they say, will be changing workflows to make them more intuitive, and there's plenty of room for improvement there.
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- May 28, 2011
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- 10,994
First of all, FreeNAS is an outstanding product. I think most of us agree. It's a powerful NAS and the cost is right for a cheap bast@rd like me.
GUI changes are a thing that we can't fight, they are going to happen even though many of us don't like it but I fear we are the minority. Most places do it for marketing reasons, not functionality, although I guess some places may do it to dumb down the interface because complicated interfaces scare off people. For example Windoze 10 is a significant change from Windoze 7. People tout that there are so many security enhancements and improvements but those enhancements could be rolled into Win 7 and leave the GUI alone. Many of us power users (old people) don't see the need for fancy GUIs, all I care about is that the product work and I can operate it without having to learn the basics all over again. I got hit with the double whammy at work with an upgrade to Win 10 and Office 2016 from Win 7 and Office 2012. From my perspective it's just a pain in the butt figuring out how to make the computer do what I want. I can think of many other GUI changes I've recently and I'm sure the readers here can relate.
As for FreeNAS changing the GUI, yea it happens and they have said there will be bugs in it, it's not a secret. I'm just happy right now that it works with the FireFox browser because originally it was going to be Chrome only. But FreeNAS isn't one of those products that I'm logged into all day long and have to manage constantly so while I may need to relearn a few minor things, it's not a big deal for me. Eventually the bugs will get worked out of the GUI and everyone will find something else to complain about. I think that for the first new GUI change that iXsystems has done a good job. They didn't rush it and while it's not a high polished GUI yet (typical for a new release this significant for any company), this is still a free product and one I really like and would hate to see go away.
In conclusion... Complain as you might, it's better to submit a bug report so iXsystems can address the problem and fix it.
GUI changes are a thing that we can't fight, they are going to happen even though many of us don't like it but I fear we are the minority. Most places do it for marketing reasons, not functionality, although I guess some places may do it to dumb down the interface because complicated interfaces scare off people. For example Windoze 10 is a significant change from Windoze 7. People tout that there are so many security enhancements and improvements but those enhancements could be rolled into Win 7 and leave the GUI alone. Many of us power users (old people) don't see the need for fancy GUIs, all I care about is that the product work and I can operate it without having to learn the basics all over again. I got hit with the double whammy at work with an upgrade to Win 10 and Office 2016 from Win 7 and Office 2012. From my perspective it's just a pain in the butt figuring out how to make the computer do what I want. I can think of many other GUI changes I've recently and I'm sure the readers here can relate.
As for FreeNAS changing the GUI, yea it happens and they have said there will be bugs in it, it's not a secret. I'm just happy right now that it works with the FireFox browser because originally it was going to be Chrome only. But FreeNAS isn't one of those products that I'm logged into all day long and have to manage constantly so while I may need to relearn a few minor things, it's not a big deal for me. Eventually the bugs will get worked out of the GUI and everyone will find something else to complain about. I think that for the first new GUI change that iXsystems has done a good job. They didn't rush it and while it's not a high polished GUI yet (typical for a new release this significant for any company), this is still a free product and one I really like and would hate to see go away.
In conclusion... Complain as you might, it's better to submit a bug report so iXsystems can address the problem and fix it.
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I'll be happy if iX & Co can keep the old GUI around until the major bugs have been squashed. For example, it's pretty important at times to be able to have a good handle on CPU temperature, especially when it's a prominent GUI feature. Similarly, a few of the process-related charts appear to be glitchy as well. I will try to document what I can.
The old UI was a steep learning experience, softened by the great community here and to a lesser extent the documentation online. Some its UI elements were simply bizarre, such as vertical and horizontal menu bars. However, the parts that were supposed to function generally did. I liken it to learning Eagle. The quirks and conventions of the programmers were apparent throughout the UI experience.
The new UI has some great improvements and the other work (such as the giant strides that anodos is making, developing Apple SMB support) will continue to make FreeNAS an excellent, platform-agnostic choice for anyone that values their data.
The old UI was a steep learning experience, softened by the great community here and to a lesser extent the documentation online. Some its UI elements were simply bizarre, such as vertical and horizontal menu bars. However, the parts that were supposed to function generally did. I liken it to learning Eagle. The quirks and conventions of the programmers were apparent throughout the UI experience.
The new UI has some great improvements and the other work (such as the giant strides that anodos is making, developing Apple SMB support) will continue to make FreeNAS an excellent, platform-agnostic choice for anyone that values their data.
danb35
Hall of Famer
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- Aug 16, 2011
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- 15,504
Very glad to see those gone--especially when they had the same labels, but didn't do the same things.
sremick
Patron
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- Sep 24, 2014
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- 323
Are you fscking kidding me? Even the fact that that was even considered for the briefest moment is infuriating. Are we back in the IE heyday where it's ok to break standards and have a browser monoculture? Did no one learn the lessons of the past? We're still dealing with the fallout of all the "Requires Internet Explorer" years. Why does Google get a free pass for pulling all the crap that Microsoft got raked over the coals for before?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/1...-only-sites-internet-explorer-6-web-standards
If FreeNAS had become Chrome-only, I would've dropped it immediately, boycotted it, and spent most of the forseable future letting them and everyone else I know what a boneheaded and wrong move that was and make sure no one I know ever touched FreeNAS.
Unbelievable. I was going to give constructive criticism regarding some tweaks to the UI I think would be beneficial, but now I'm seething over the whole Chrome thing. Any group that'd even consider that loses so much faith from me and karma that I have to question my choice of tools.
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