this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2024
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What stopped the install process working without a mouse?
Surely they'd have a keyboard navigation method.
They do... For the first screen of the welcome page only. When it gets to connect WiFi the keyboard nav is broken. Tabbing doesn't work.
Beyond that if you hit alt F4 to close the welcome page you get to your desktop, but Fedora doesn't come with any predefined hotkeys (or at least none of them worked on Fedora 39, if there were any - it might have been part of the welcome screen). So I couldn't open up a terminal or anything to actually get to useful controls.
After an hour of fighting with this and seeing useless forum posts I scrapped it and installed Mint, where they actually bothered to let you open up Bluetooth connection management with only a keyboard.
You could've shifted into tty mode from there I think, but they don't have a hotkey for a terminal emulator up. You probably also could've just hit the super key and used the search bar for "ter-" and it'll pull it up, hit enter, and it'll launch. Personally if none of that worked I would've went to walmart and bought the cheapest little logitec mouse with a usb dongle or borrowed one from work for a few days because they're cool like that.
Of course, you shouldn't have to find a work around even if there are some, so there's that too.
In theory super + term should've worked but in reality super didn't open up search.
It was incredibly cursed.
Ultimately Mint was 0 effort so I'll be sticking with it. It's only a little toy laptop anyways.
If this ever happens to you again, you can try doing
ctrl + alt + < F1 - F12>. That will bring up different screens/terminals and its so baked into linux it might have still worked even in that broken state. Still bonkers the installer didn't accept keyboars info though. Its ironic because so much of my linux experience has been about reducing mouse/touchpad use.It didn't work. I tried so many different options. I got to the point where I was facerolling the keyboard with all sorts of different options.
This is something acknowledged by Fedora devs: It's not my imagination.
Here's the link
couldn't you have just used the laptop's built-in pointing device, plugged in a wired mouse or paired BT via console... instead of dying on this hill?
That's an obviously poor take. If only laptop users could get past the screen then it's still broken.
None of the options I gave are exclusive to laptops.
You were literally responded by suggesting they use their laptop's HID, then suggested a wired mouse which they said they didn't have, then suggested using the console which the install process doesn't advertise as a possibility to the user.
Poor UX is a bug, it needs to be updated.
I don't disagree with that at all. I was responding specifically to where you said "if only laptop users could", and I was just stating that the options I presented did not have a laptop as a prerequisite in order to use said options. It still needs fixing as you said, I just don't agree with OP's swift dismissal of the entire distro as a non-starter for the reason stated.
It was a mainboard not a full laptop. No built in pointing device.
Couldn't open the console because fedora would not accept any keystrokes to open terminal.
I don't have a USB c mouse.
The only way to fix this would be purchasing a USB c mouse. I'm not installing fedora to pay more.