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:
"But it sure wastes screen space like nothing I have seen before. In many places scrolling is required although everything would fit nicely into one screen."
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?
There are further inconsistencies like the service view has an "action" column but does not contain action buttons. There are edit pencils instead.
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.