Arch Linux's Install Media Adds "Archinstall" For Quick/Easy Installations

[BwackNinja]

Talk about gatekeeping users, forgetting the fact that there are different kind of scenarios where not all users are maintainers, example: family member.
Unofficial or not, making it easier for people PLUS an alternative is still better than nothing, best of both worlds even.

This might be a point if Arch Linux was the only Linux distro. It's not even the most popular.

It's not a gate, it's a hurdle. Nobody is there to open it for you and say, "why yes, you're a real Arch user now and get to tell everyone." A distro shouldn't have to be for everyone. Arch Linux's problem is its popularity from giving people a smug sense of superiority and for being rolling-release. It filled a niche well enough (simple, vanilla, rolling-release, easily-configurable), that people outside the niche came, but that doesn't mean that those new people should be catered to. There are more than enough alternatives, and there are distros based on Arch.

If a family member isn't also going to be a maintainer, I don't think Arch Linux is a proper fit. Maintaining a system for someone who isn't going to become independent is already a burden. No need to make it worse on yourself.

[r_a_trip]

This is not true. It is not about "posing". [ snip ]

Then this wasn't addressed to you. There are areas of the net where being able to follow instructions is equated to being god-like by some Arch users. Where people insinuate that you don't know what Linux is until you install Arch.

[creoflux]

Nobody is there to open it for you and say, "why yes, you're a real Arch user now and get to tell everyone."

Sounds like a gap in the market... how much do you think people would be willing to be authenticated as legit Arch users? I could detect the justified amount of smugness in their tone perhaps?

[schmidtbag]

Ouch, the Arch diehards aren't going to like this as they believe that Arch shouldn't be quick and easy to install.

Maybe that's the case about being easy, but a real Arch diehard would say it should be quick to install and wouldn't need the Wiki. As far as I'm concerned, Arch very well could be the fastest distro to get installed with modern capabilities and a robust package manager.

And speaking of the wiki, I think this is actually a good option for people like me, who use Arch regularly but only install it once in a blue moon. I know what I'm doing, I know how to follow the wiki, and I get the gist of how to set up the system, but I don't have it memorized and it can be rather tedious needing a separate device as a reference. The most tedious part of Arch is the base install process, and this basically helps speed that up.

The thing is, much of the beauty in the Arch installer is how it's scriptable. Well, this is basically just a pre-made script that applies to the majority of users.

[leipero]

BwackNinja That would be all fine if your assumption is correct, see, the issue is, there's really no distribution alternative to Arch, it's main advantages over ohter distributions:
1. have simple and quick package manager and it's very flexible.
2. Use "vanilla" packages whenever it's possible.
3. Use simple and straight forward way for configuring the system.
4. It's rolling release, once you have it installed it's done for years even decades in some cases.

Other Arch based spins have some shared advantages, but it often happens that people who do those spins add their own choices in it, and that really goes against philosophy of Arch. Needlesly memorizing every single command is not something useful (unless you do only installations every single day) one can have from such distribution.

schmidtbag I'd say the most time consuming part is configuration of the base packages, otherwise I agree. In theory (and practise/reality in at least last few years) you install Arch once, and you are done.

[muncrief]

Aaahh! I never thought I'd see the day Arch including an installer? That's awesome!

Arch is my primary OS and I love it, but I always thought the low level install process was unnecessary and counterproductive to greater adoption of Arch. It still looks pretty low level as far as modern installers go, but nothing as bad as pacstrap, and hopefully something a regular user can navigate.

Anyway I'm going to fire up a VM and give it try.

[ermo]

Recently installed EndeavourOS w/the default offline option (which installs Xfce 4.16) because I needed a zero fuss install experience w/sane defaults that happened to offer glibc-2.33 and certain development tools ootb in its repos.

So far, I have to say that it has been a very pleasant experience with a useful and simple way to keep the system updated w/a nice little GUI app that helps abstract away the implementation details for doing the most common post-install stuff like setting up mirrors, updating the system w/a nice AUR helper (yay!), applying new config settings etc.

It almost feels like I don't necessarily need to care about the fact that it's Arch underneath the hood per se, but all the power and configurability is there if I *do* end up needing it.

I simply cannot overstate the benefits of having an Arch-based system that just works ootb and does what I expect of it without impeding me unnecessarily, as I feel that I've done enough Arch installs both pre- and post-systemd that I really don't care to waste another minute doing so.

To each their own I guess.

[[email protected]]

Well, thats a nice addition. For those unaware, ArchLinux had an installer in the first place. The ArchLinux Installation Framework (AIF), which was in use until 2012 and was similar to the FreeBSD installer.

[BwackNinja]

BwackNinja That would be all fine if your assumption is correct, see, the issue is, there's really no distribution alternative to Arch, it's main advantages over ohter distributions:
1. have simple and quick package manager and it's very flexible.
2. Use "vanilla" packages whenever it's possible.
3. Use simple and straight forward way for configuring the system.
4. It's rolling release, once you have it installed it's done for years even decades in some cases.

Other Arch based spins have some shared advantages, but it often happens that people who do those spins add their own choices in it, and that really goes against philosophy of Arch. Needlesly memorizing every single command is not something useful (unless you do only installations every single day) one can have from such distribution.

I love pacman, but I also love the packaging format even more because it's so easy to create a package that integrates with the system -- just one straightforward text file. That's not what less technically inclined users are going to do or need. I don't think that the kind of user who would have enough difficulty with installing Arch Linux manually would care much about the packaging system beyond what packages are available. "pacman -S $packagename" is slightly less intuitive than "apt-get install $packagename".

Unopinionated packaging is coming more and more with the likes of flatpak and snap, and those also negate a lot of the advantages that being a rolling release distro has while retaining a minimally changing core. You have to update/upgrade regardless -- at least for security updates, and if you don't update anything you won't get any benefits of being rolling release anyway. I'd also argue that Arch being rolling release is only incidental; it's so vanilla that there's never a logical point to make a new release.

Ease of configuration again comes from being vanilla. There aren't custom layers on top, no alternatives system to deal with, so that might make it less friendly for a lot of users. Those commands to install are the same commands you'd use for maintaining your system. It doesn't do much of anything special in that regard.

As an aside, I wrote a simple Arch Linux installer ~9 years ago with pygtk, so I'm familiar with what it takes to do a simple streamlined installer. I'm also biased towards learning more about my system because I ran a Linux From Scratch system (with some changes to the base, like systemd for init) from 2011 to 2017. I'm working to get back to that soon.

[fahrenheit]

It would be cool if Artix had an installer, more GUI wouldn't be bad, one with easier zfs setup thought of. I also wonder if Artix is as fully developed as Manjaro...

Artix has an GUI installer, this besides the grub boot options, plus the wiki info for manual setup.

Like several people said, installing by following the wiki is very straight forward. Artix with its 3 init systems is around 10 steps.
What desktop live cds do right is giving users a way to follow the wiki without needing to get out their phones.