Re: Installer suggestions
I have thought for a long time that the way many Linux distros do
installers is very very wrong.
What is an installer? An installer boots your computer and sets up a new
system on it. Two parts:
- boot your computer;
- set up a new system on it.
Keep them separate. As always, one tool, one task. There are live
distros that do the work of booting a system very well.
An installer should be a stand-alone program that can be easily run from
any booted system.
Package it conveniently into a live distro if you want, but make
sure we can use it from any live distro or installed system.
I think this is one of the few things Ubuntu does better than Debian.
As for myself, I have not used the installer for a very long time, and
each time I try again I find it so inconvenient that I realize why.
Using debootstrap and finishing things by hand is my modus operandi.
An excellent installer would let us do one step manually (say: create
the volumes and filesystems and mount them), then do a few more steps
automatically (install the base system and fill in the essential config
files), then do more steps manually (set up a tricky network), and again
more steps automatically, etc.
Regards,
--
Nicolas George
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