I tried the installer in a VM, and it was not as good as I had hoped. Sure, I booted to a fully working GNOME desktop first try without reading any instructions, but the installer was unpolished and didn’t feel official at all.
There was no “go back” in the script. If you did something wrong, just stop the script and run it again.
It was just text. After a while the screen filled up with instructions and questions and everything looked the same, I had to concentrate to find the step I was on.
The alternatives were listed before the questions. I can understand why it is that way, but it felt unnatural to me.
I love that they include an installer now, but I’m not sure who it is for. IMO It’s too complicated for a beginner, and more experienced users probably want more customization than is offered in the installer.
I don’t think this is supposed to be for beginners. In fact I don’t think it’s wise to use if you want to setup a system for the first time. I do think it really shines as a library though.
You can create a custom installer to setup your systems for known hardware in less than 50 lines of python. In the unattended example is shows how you can build profiles such that if you have multiple hardware configurations the script can match configurations to a systems MAC address and then set it up accordingly.
This can do wonders if you are doing automated system deployments at home or for a company. You can setup your custom install with one command and have it up and running in a couple minutes.
I tried the installer in a VM, and it was not as good as I had hoped. Sure, I booted to a fully working GNOME desktop first try without reading any instructions, but the installer was unpolished and didn’t feel official at all.
There was no “go back” in the script. If you did something wrong, just stop the script and run it again.
It was just text. After a while the screen filled up with instructions and questions and everything looked the same, I had to concentrate to find the step I was on.
The alternatives were listed before the questions. I can understand why it is that way, but it felt unnatural to me.
I love that they include an installer now, but I’m not sure who it is for. IMO It’s too complicated for a beginner, and more experienced users probably want more customization than is offered in the installer.
I don’t think this is supposed to be for beginners. In fact I don’t think it’s wise to use if you want to setup a system for the first time. I do think it really shines as a library though.
Checkout the examples folder in the repo: https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/tree/master/examples
You can create a custom installer to setup your systems for known hardware in less than 50 lines of python. In the unattended example is shows how you can build profiles such that if you have multiple hardware configurations the script can match configurations to a systems MAC address and then set it up accordingly.
This can do wonders if you are doing automated system deployments at home or for a company. You can setup your custom install with one command and have it up and running in a couple minutes.