Arch Linux - News: Installation medium with installer
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    • joojmachineOP
      3·
      4 years ago

      It is real, it was just poorly (on perfectly, depending on who you ask) timed.

  • yetwot
    4·
    4 years ago

    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.

    • polymerwitch
      6·
      4 years ago

      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.

  • AxG68K
    2·
    4 years ago

    Not sure if I like the idea of an Arch installer. If you have no time to learn how to do it manually then Manjaro is a great option. I use both arch and manjaro and they are both excellent and quite frankly very similar. It will probably fill up the arch linux forums with questions that would have been self answered in the manual install process. This will breed even more elitism and hate towards noobs. Hopefully It will die off due to lack of development interest.

    • bbhtt
      1·
      4 years ago

      It was mainly for contributors and bug-reporters so that they can create a system quickly and reproduce issues/test things; when archinstall was moved to the repos. I haven’t seen anyone asking support specific to the install script method yet. And the wiki isn’t going away; if anyone doesn’t have a basic grasp of for example partitioning or in need of a customized setup they’ll still need to read it.