Improved Arch Linux Installer Experience Being Readied With Archinstall 2.4-RC1

Debuting on the Arch Linux monthly ISOs a year ago was Archinstall as a way to carry out quick and easy installations of this popular Linux distribution. Over the past year Archinstall has matured into increasingly robust shape for quickly installing Arch Linux.

Archinstall lowers the barrier for installing Arch Linux itself and not using one of the Arch Linux downstreams like EndeavourOS or Manjaro Linux. Archinstall's text user interface is very easy to use, provides some levels of defaults for Arch Linux, and gets an Arch Linux install in a matter of minutes whether you are after a full-blown desktop installation or one of the smaller minimal/server-oriented setups.

Archinstall 2.4 is being prepared as the next feature update while overnight the first release candidate was published. Archinstall 2.4 is working on a completely new menu system for this text-based installer. The new menu system is making use of simple-term-menu.

Archinstall, showing off their new TUI menu system.

This new version also has improvements to the Btrfs file-system handling code that can now allow for more complex layouts and specifying Btrfs transparent file-system compression options and the no data copy-on-write (nodatacow) mode.

Archinstall 2.4 also has many API additions and improvements for those carrying out Python scripting around this Arch Linux installer.

Some of the other smaller changes include making the Arch Liux installer a reproducible build, KWrite replacing Kate as the text editor in the KDE install profile, and many different bug fixes.

More details on the Archinstall 2.4 release candidate over on GitHub.