Mark Shuttleworth wants to build an Ubuntu installer with Electron | Hacker News Reader

Mark Shuttleworth wants to build an Ubuntu installer with Electron

lists.ubuntu.com

7 pointsO_H_E11 comments

Perhaps when he's done with the Electron installer he can write one similar to OpenBSD's installer. That way, anyone who doesn't have 8 GB of RAM can also install Ubuntu.

So now their installer can be more bloated than the OS! :-)

Jokes aside, I wonder why he feels like he needs to build one in Electron. I think "just cause we can" can be great fun, but I was looking for a more substantial reason but can't seem to find it.

I've been running Linux distros for some time now (and Ubuntu being my standard for some years) and did not feel like the installers were any trouble in the past few years.

Installer might be ok, because it only has to start once. Otherwise the startup and UI lag times are too high with electron apps.

I'm more worried the installer will lose even more features while adding HTML5 animations.

I suspect hiring people willing to write UIs in C/C++ is becoming a challenge over time.

They say "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". The current installer has its quirks, the proposed one will have even more.

Who chooses an electron app over a Python implementation? It's like picking atom over sublime.

Sounds great, hopefully he can keep working on a good distro! At this point in time, installing Linux generally isn't a problem at all. Fedora installs great, SUSE installs great, Ubuntu installs great, etc.

I'm pretty amused at the responses to his message - there are none as far as I can see. Apparently the answer to his question is "Nobody".

Why not GTK? Gnome developers should make "standard" Linux installer - Software app works pretty good and fast.

I feel like at this point, we should just be glad that Canonical is not creating a brand new API/framework/specification/"standard", and actually using an existing one.

Reinventing the wheel... there's the fantastic Calamares Installer Framework which solves exactly this problem: https://calamares.io/

> Reinventing the wheel

Canonical is notorious for doing this. The silver lining in this case is that they aren't reinventing all of the pieces of the wheel..

Yea, Calamares is a really cool project. It's a shame Canonical isn't using it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com