> Actually it's worse than that they used to have a TUI installer but then removed it
Not sure what you're referring to here. Archinstall [1] is relatively recent [2]. I used it a few weeks ago to quickly yeet a machine into Arch for some testing. Worked flawlessly and had the machine from live boot -> Arch install on root media in under 5 minutes.
> if I want a simple installer where everything just works
I actually feel like the archinstall[0] tool included in the official Arch ISOs really nails easy installation. It's an official way to install Arch that is incredibly user friendly and fast, in my opinion.
> Hopefully this eventually results in more user friendly Arch Linux installers.
Funny you say that! Arch images now ship with an official installer as of a couple of months ago - which is comparable to the Ubuntu or Fedora installers in ease-of-use.
> I can at least tell you that people don't choose Arch over Debian for the installation experience
Well, I do (sample of one). The Arch installation has been streamlined a lot. Now it’s all about
0) boot the image (cd, usb, PXE), which is actually an Arch install
a) creating your filesystem (pick you poison), and mounting it
b) telling pacman to install base, base-devel, and a bootloader on the target fs
c) installing and configuring the bootloader
d) rebooting
Done.
d-i barely takes care of that for you, it’s “just” wrapping it behind a UI (which is sort of useful, sure saves one from reading docs, but has been an annoying abstraction/obfuscation/magic layer for me more often than not).
The remainder (setting up X/Wayland/whatever is no different on Debian than on Arch, as d-i does not help much.
> I would not recommend anyone to use Arch unless they are willing to spend a lot of time fiddling with their machine and I wouldn't install it on anything that I might have to use at a moments notice since as I've been told part of Arch is that updating your packages just breaks your OS.
Yes, exactly right. As an Arch user, I endorse this.
> Arch only recently got a decent UI-based installer
There's still no UI installer. There's now an official install script.
But install scripts have been around for as long as Arch has. Including UI ones.
EndeavourOS isn't just installing Arch, it also unnecessarily installs a firewall and uses things like Dracut.
> Since Arch stable is indeed stable these days
What do you mean "Arch stable"? Arch has testing repositories but those are just for testing. Besides Arch has always been as stable as a rolling release distribution can be.
I assume that's how that part of installation works. They could have documented that more nicely, though...
(Also, I use dwm. It works out of the box, using it on a stock Arch system is as simple as compiling, installing, and adding it to .xinitrc. And configuration has been made extremely simple also. It's not obvious at all, but it works for the particular niche I fit into.)
That's because you're hanging out with too many Gentoo users.
The Arch Way[1] is stupid. Less broadly, it's a poor, knee-jerk reaction to Debian maintainers' over-zealous patching of software. Trusting upstream software maintainers to properly tag "stable" releases (which means something different for everyone) and to work with the rest of the software in the system is a mistake. Also, that's the entire point of package maintainers maintaining repositories.
But that's OK. Something went wrong (again)? Just downgrade[2]!
> Hopefully this eventually results in more user friendly Arch Linux installers.
Pretty sure it won't. I bet it's going to use a self-made system upgrade facility and not rely directly on pacman either.
pacman is great for its intended use-cases, but it's not a package manager you want to use with no supervision of an experienced user. It may even silently leave a package in broken state just because the rootfs went full during the upgrade.
And at the very least, pretty sure they're not going to use actual Arch system repos but roll their own.
> I think you're confusing Arch with Gentoo or something - the Arch package manager is not from-source, it ships binaries just like apt. Perhaps you're thinking of the AUR
Sorry, what I meant was: when I need to manage the version of something carefully, I just compile it from source and that's OK with me. My understanding is that people use the AUR for this on Arch, and the pains don't seem worth it.
> The main thing that people like about it is the rolling release model
Fair enough, though I've been pretty happy with the pace of update from, for example, Fedora.
> That's very much a "cover-your-ass" type disclaimer, like a ToS that says you have no right to expect anything to work.
> Or, burden of burdens!, you could spend a couple of extra minutes and a handful of clicks to track down the "unofficial" non-Free installer image.
I only got to know about the unofficial installer on here, years after it could've been useful. At the time, I didn't have an extra machine to fetch the necessary binaries I needed to get networking working on my laptop. This was when I dropped Debian.
I'd be perfectly fine with an installer that lets me have the choice, as long as it doesn't require me to reboot into a different OS to actually fetch the stuff I need. Just think of the man-hours wasted globally.
> These are not the installer ISOs, they're ISOs containing the _sources_ for all packages in Ubuntu.
I'm aware, you can install from source [1] [2]. My application is embedded devices that cannot connect to the internet that need to run blazingly fast on 'minimal' hardware for a long time. Ubuntu was chosen because we needed support for things like ROS and Nvidia.
The problem is that we would take a source image occasionally and then archive it on our infrastructure, so it looks like one download but actually services a significant number of machines.
As I mentioned previously, snap is just outright hostile. It's a massive shame for Linux to be forced to use it.
> Like offering users a GUI click-through installer?
I can't say if it's a joke or if you are serious.
But if you like an installer, there's manjaro.
Personally, I think install shouldn't need a click-through installer: it should be done by a commandline, to have a finer control over all the details.
With Ubuntu, I only used the installer iso to type Control-Shift-A to get a terminal, install rsync and do my tinkering.
> I really don’t see how arch fairs any better here, care to elaborate?
Arch has spent a considerably amount of time getting to the figure it has and is in the same position as NixOS to maintain reproducible builds. The claim that NixOS solves this, or is uniquely dispositioned to solve this, is the false. That is what I'm effectively trying to point out here.
>While it is a different problem, my litmus test for package managers is installing gnome a (the whole group) and then seeing whether I can transition to kde or vice versa without a bunch of dependencies lingering around forever. Pacman, apt, etc. all fail terribly here.
> and an author who has somehow never had to build a package for anything but Arch (deb would be much worse) complaining about the difficulty of building RPMs to install/overlay on the host system, which is not the intended use case anyway, is silly.
I can assure you I've built packages for more than just Arch Linux, and that building RPMs was by far the most frustrating experience of all :)
> You guys really have less trouble with package managers than Windows installers?
Hell yeah. I remember when I had to set aside entire weekends to reinstall a Windows machine. These days, when I need to reinstall one of my Linux boxes, I just fire up the Arch installer, and instead of installing the "base" package group as the manual instructs you, I install my configuration package for that machine which pulls in all applications (from the kernel and coreutils all the way up to Steam) and contains all configuration. When I recently reinstalled my notebook to enable full-disk encryption, it took me around 30 minutes, of which most time was spent downloading packages, and downloading /home from the backup storage. Net working time was maybe 5 minutes. I actually watched a movie while doing it.
The issues that you're seeing are because the particular package manager you encountered is shit. (Or rather, because Debian's/Ubuntu's byzantine packaging processes create a ton of pathological cases.) I've never had such problems on Arch. (Except for those cases about once a year when they restructure something and the package manager is confused, in which case you go to archlinux.org and the most recent news item contains the magic shell incantation that immediately resolves the issue.)
> this is a fundamental problem with the security model of Arch Linux
And with every other OS that isn't locked down so the user can't run arbitrary stuff.
The AUR is just the arch equivalent of downloading a `.exe` installer and running it. Yes, clearly there are security concerns there, but they aren't specific to Arch.
If you want a level of trust, then don't build AUR packages and install things using the package manager (AUR packages aren't supported by it) which have trusted maintainers and are signed.
> Very friendly (but also effective) installer. Probably the best I'd seen, at the time. Hell, maybe still the best.
The Installer in BeOS/Haiku does't do anything special: it just copies everything from the source to the target. The Installer is available in the installed system too, therefore you can install your installed and personalized system to a different disk, basically cloning everything.
But you forgot the bootmanager from your list.
I still yet to see anything like this 2 in other OS.
> It's inelegant, to say the very least, but it works just fine! I'm pretty sure I saw that technique used a few times during Twitch Installs Arch Linux, during the more exotic segments when some joker hijacked the effort temporarily by installing Windows 95, and TempleOS, and so on.
Don't forget Gentoo! That's precisely how they installed it.
> ? Installing directly from the source instead of from an intermediary is good, not bad.
How many users did actually install directly from the source and not from a highly visible third party download page that collected and repackaged many programs with some drive by downloads involving adware? I remember falling for that a few times in my youth and even sites like Sourceforge hosting the projects directly ended up hijacking installers for a time.
> Imagine computers just working. Who would want that.
The fix was to pop up a window and asking if you want it to run. Nothing broken about that. Auto running software on an OS where everyone is sys admin by default is not a good idea.
Not sure what you're referring to here. Archinstall [1] is relatively recent [2]. I used it a few weeks ago to quickly yeet a machine into Arch for some testing. Worked flawlessly and had the machine from live boot -> Arch install on root media in under 5 minutes.
[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-Does-Archinstall
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