Comment by Levitating

Comment by Levitating 4 days ago

> idk why Arch doesn't invest in whats standard in every other major distro

Simplicity, among other reasons. Installers force the users hand and need maintenance. Having no installer but rather a detailed installation guide offers unlimited freedom to users. Installation isn't difficult either, you just pacstrap a root filesystem and configure the bootloader, mounts and locale.

ArchLinux does now have an installer called archinstall, but it's described more as a library than a tool. It allows you to automate the installation using profiles.

Levitating 4 days ago

Just to paint an example, if I am installing Arch I like to have:

* A user configured through systemd-homed with luks encryption

* The limine bootloader

* snapperd from OpenSUSE with pacman hooks

* systemd-networkd and systemd-resolved

* sway with my custom ruby based bar

* A root filesystem in a btrfs subvolume, often shared across multiple disks in raid0

If you were to follow the installation guide it will tell you to consider these networking/bootloader/encryption options just fine. But trying to create an installer which supports all these bleeding edge features is futile.

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BoxOfRain 4 days ago

Also if you want 'Arch with sensible defaults' CachyOS is basically that, people think of it as a 'gaming distro' but that's not an accurate characterisation. I use it as a daily driver on my personal machine mostly for non-gaming work and it's an excellent distro.

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muthuh 4 days ago

There is though the TUI installer, not like it used to be where the commands were typed in following the wiki. Not that there was anything wrong with the 'manual' mode, it gave you insight into the basic building blocks/configurations right from the start.

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vladvasiliu 4 days ago

It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some form of menu-driven installer.
Nowadays, there are so many ways to partition the drive (lvm, luks, either one on top of the other; zfs with native encryption or through dm-crypt), having the efi boot directly a unified kernel image or fiddle with some bootloader (among a plethora of options)...
One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters, and would hate to have to fight the installer to attain my goals. I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going. All it takes with Arch is to spend a few minutes reading the wiki and you're off to the races. The actual installation part is trivial.
But then again, if you have no idea what you want to do, staring at the freshly-booted install disk prompt can be daunting. Bonus points for it requiring internet for installation. I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC with no wired ethernet, and I've been using the thing for a very long time.

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- Levitating 4 days ago
  
  > One of the principal reasons why I love Arch is being able to have a say in some of these base matters
  Exactly, Arch allows you to do many bleeding edge things. An installer would never keep up are give you that freedom.
  > I remember when Ubuntu supported root on zfs but the installer didn't it was rather involved to get the install going.
  That's why many installers allow you to drop a shell when it's time to partition.
  > I would have to look up the correct incantation to get the wifi connected on a newer PC
  To be honest that would largely be helped if archiso would start using NetworkManager
  
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- boomboomsubban 4 days ago
  
  >It's been a very long time since I moved to Arch, but I swear that something like 12 years ago it did have some form of menu-driven installer.
  Yep, removed in 2012 as the last maintainer quit. Maintaining an installer seems like one of the least fun hobbies.
  
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