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Comment by ostenning | Hacker News Reader

Great news. The idea of having an installation process as a gatekeeper is laughable. The more people who get access to Arch the better. It is the best distro in my opinion.

I also find the it kind of ironic that the Arch community want effortless hidpi scaling but aren’t willing to let people into there elitist gated community.

Linux is not a platform for elitism.

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But manual Arch installation is really more like "teaching a man to fish" -- and in that way is the opposite of gatekeeping. Anyone with the curiosity and patience gets to have their hand held through a learning process with all of the intricacies explained and context given for the user to make their own decisions along the way.

That said, I welcome the installer option as well. Once you've been through the manual process a few times, it becomes less about the journey and more about the destination.

That would be the case if they hadn't thrown out the beginner's installation guide. What they have now is completely generic and largely useless for anybody who needs some amount of guidance or explanation. The current guide is basically throwing somebody into the deep-end and saying "here's this wiki page on how to swim, have fun". I pretty much gave up on Arch entirely after that fiasco.

The current situation isn't some kind of gatekeeping move to keep n00bs out. There has been an installer for years in the past, but it wasn't maintained anymore; keeping the distribution with some wiki pages to help people was certainly better than to completely stop any installation until an alternative was found.

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