Here's what they say in that article about why they turned it into a web app, for those who don't want to look for it
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
Huh, I wonder if developing a web app is that much easier than developing a GTK app, or a Qt app… I mean, sure, there are way more web developers than people experienced with native development toolkits, but I wonder if it isn’t a tooling problem from the part of the toolkits. I certainly don’t have any experience in any of these, so I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts.
Cool poem, where’s it from?