Discussion of the New GUI design
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At times I access the gui from my smartphone, what does the smartphone version look like?
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@Bob.Dig I get "400 Netgate Nexus is not supported on this system". According to the docs there should be links to the GUI in settings if enabled -> not for me.
Do I really need firewall rules if I run it locally only?
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@DominikHoffmann said in Discussion of the New GUI design:
but access it on Port 8443.
well that could be problematic - I use 8443 for my normal gui, vs running it on 443
edit: ah you can easy change them
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This just looks like a reskin of the existing gui. I agree that it wastes too much space on nothing. I'm a second-class CE citizen so I don't have access to this, nor would I use it if I did. pfsense-dark is good enough for me which is good considering there are only 5 gui themes and 2 of them have been marked -BETA for what seems like years now.
Frankly, I find it amazing how so many open source projects (made by people in their spare time for free) have great, intuitive, modern guis whereas the ones made by paid professional developers look like something from 10-20 years ago. This isn't a specific knock against Netgate as so many other companies are also gui-challenged.
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Well...
The speed is welcome and responsive.
The waste of space on the dashboard is unwelcome. I want to get more stuff on my dashboard, not less, and this is a lot less than even now with the old GUI. I already don't see as much of the widget information the existing GUI as I would like. It's not much of a dashboard otherwise.
The traffic graph doesn't show any traffic other than nothing. The time moves by at the bottom, but otherwise nothing. I need to be able to sort or arrange the interfaces shown on the traffic graph pane. Right now it seems to be random. Not arranged in any discernible order. The pull down(s) should be sorted alpha-numeric too. They seem random as well.
Not all the widgets I currently have on my dashboard seem to be available.
I'd like to be able to hide the side bar automatically or manually for when the dashboard is being the dashboard and I'm just monitoring the network.
On the dashboard I'd like to hide the 'items per page' controls if unneeded. They're huge and if everything is displayed there's no purpose for them being there taking up space.
On widgets like the system pane, I'd like word-wrap to be an option instead of just a horizontal scrolling region. I don't want to have to right-scroll with a mouse in each window that's got data too wide for the widget. Cumbersome.
The top-menu functions are fast and familiar in layout. I appreciate that. And the configuration pages look good, although they also have too much wasteful white-space and fonts are too big. And I've got a 27" display...they just waste too much space and then require scrolling and leaving the home keys for the mouse all the time. Cumbersome.
Clearly the dashboard page is missing a ton of widgets right now. I'd need to see more and get the space issues fixed before commenting much more.
Performance is an improvement and it looks good, but compared to how Ubiquti's GUIs look it's not even close. Sorry; I imagine a lot of work went into this, but if the intent is to compete on this feature, it's not at that level. And it's difficult to imagine this is anywhere near taking over from the old GUI in five months.
Finally, don't disable or remove the old interface when deprecated.
I'm going to go turn the new one off again for now. It's not ready for daily driving.
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@Mission-Ghost
Well said and I agree. -
What is annoying is this:
Note: Virtual machines as well as some third-party platforms may not support the new GUI due to missing machine information required to correctly run the software.I run pfSense Plus on various virtualized setups. In all my setups I know exactly what CPU I have in each hypervisor and what the CPU and NIC hardware acceleration features are ("cat /proc/cpu" etc). I baseline all my VMs to x86-64-v3 so they can be migrated to anywhere.
It feels patronising to not be told what features this new code requires from CPU, and possibly NIC. I understand that Netgate want to push their own hardware but c'mon - don't be like this.
I don't want to play Russian Roulette where a forced update to this new GUI somewhere down the line leaves my current pfSense installs inoperable, and Netgate won't even give me the info so I can research if my current gear is compatible or not. I'm currently conducting a network re-evaluation right now to see whether to continue on with pfSense, or move all sites over to UBNT UDM-Pro-Max's and UCG's, and this sort of stuff is not making the case for pfSense any better.
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@Gcon said in Discussion of the New GUI design:
this sort of stuff is not making the case for pfSense any better
Enshitification always gets worse, never better.
@netblues That's hilarious. Locking a gui behind drm.
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@KOM Well. after filling in a bogus serial number, it managed to start, but still see some errors.
Since this is an rc I would suggest adding a few lines of code, so when no serial is found, just use a default bogus one.
3 lines of code, maybe less.
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M marcosm moved this topic from webGUI
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Hi, what happends if Nexus i not activated? What GUI is active?
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@fireodo No worries.
Actually both the new and the old are working at the same time, just on different ports.
The new one is more or less experimental, it will take a few more releases to reach maturity, 4 sure. -
I was hoping to get people to provide some constructive input on specifics that could be changed in the new GUI, in order to make it better.
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@netblues said in Discussion of the New GUI design:
@fireodo No worries.
Actually both the new and the old are working at the same time, just on different ports.
The new one is more or less experimental, it will take a few more releases to reach maturity, 4 sure.Thanks for the clarification.
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@fireodo said in Discussion of the New GUI design:
The new one is more or less experimental, it will take a few more releases to reach maturity, 4 sure.
The press release read very differently.
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A few issues observed
Haproxy, and haproxy stats should be reversed. Stats appears under configuration and is misleading.
monitoring seems to be completely broken.
All monitors are empty, no add or delete button.
service monitoring. Only delete button available.
And since I see not supported/license errors, I don't dare to change config while running rc in general.
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@DominikHoffmann Finally got around to start testing the new UI and:
1: OMG the speed and response is good - MUCH MUCH faster than the old UI - very welcome
2: I have to agree on too much whitespace. The same information takes up too much space now and causes much scrooling.
3: NOT a fan of the "hidden" save button, and the fact you have to use it on all non "rules" related pages. If you make a change on something already configured, you have to remember to go to the three lines dialog and select save. It's not clearly visible when changes are made that requires saving. If you navigate away by mistake all is lost.
So on rules pages everything is saved as soon as you create/edit/delete it - everywhere else you have to click save otherwise your settings are lost.4: I'm going to miss the ability to change a LOT of rules and then finally select commit.... A LOT!
I like where this is going, and I know most of the changes is really more a muscle memory training thing, so I won't comment on all the little things. But points 2-4 is more that a muscle memory thing - I think they need changing.
PS: I assume a lot of the missing dashboard widgets will be available at some time as well? Is too sparse as it is now.
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Hi everyone! I'm the GUI team lead, and have been working on this upgrade for a while now. First, thank you for all of your feedback! Up to this point, our primary focus has been getting the new GUI and API functionally equivalent to the old GUI. With how many pages and options exist in pfSense, there are sure to be some bugs we haven't found yet, and improvements to be made to the look and feel.
We hear your comments about the whitespace, and are working on some better layouts. This has been complained about internally for a while, but our priority has been function over form (setting up interfaces and firewall rules are more important than looking pretty
).More dashboard widgets are coming! We are working on widgetizing as fast as possible, we selected some of the important widgets to get started, but they will all be here soon. Some widgets are basically the same as the status pages, but several are bespoke and require us to add to the API for support.
If you don't like the save button being hidden, it can be changed in the settings menu (toolbox view->right-side toolbox).
In 26.07, the Nexus sidebar is collapsible so it should take up a lot less room.
Packages are also coming. Because of the way PHP works, packages basically inserted themselves into the existing code and just worked. The new architecture needed some tweaking to support package configuration, but it's mostly finished now.
Locking the new GUI to Netgate official hardware was not our intention (and it does work on some non-Netgate boxes), things should improve in 26.07 and future releases. We do indeed plan to replace the PHP GUI with this one, so it should be supported on all boxes.
We are working as fast as possible to improve the new GUI. Please continue to report any bugs you may encounter and share any feedback that you have!
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@tkerr Thank you for joining this thread, and I’ll do my utmost to help testing and trying things out, while keeping it constructive
I really like where this is going in terms of speed and if focus soon turns to making it more “pleasant” in screenspace and looks, this is going to be really good for pfSense
One thing - is it wise to use all ressources on starting with at one-to-one replica of the old UI? You have made some minor adjustments to keep things slightly more logical organised in 26.07s new UI, but:
Some of the changes - while keeping the same organisation as before - also leads to more mouseclicks and navigation in the windows to complete a task. Perhaps rethinking some of the layout in the individual features menu windows would be optimal at this time (since things are changing anyways)? -
@tkerr said in Discussion of the New GUI design:
Packages are also coming. Because of the way PHP works, packages basically inserted themselves into the existing code and just worked. The new architecture needed some tweaking to support package configuration, but it's mostly finished now.
Are you doing all the package conversions? Or are package maintainers? If maintainers, is there any doc we can look at? Or source examples?
FWIW, I note that one of the packages I maintain, Avahi, appears to have been converted. It’s showing up in the new UI as “mDNS”. Can we change the name back to Avahi please? I’m looking to deprecate Avahi, and I don’t want to Avahi to be confused with mDNS Bridge which is intended to replace Avahi. Thanks.
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