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Comment by rataata_jr | Hacker News Reader

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rataata_jr

Do we have a gui installer for Guix these days? Last I checked, they didn't.

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The Guix installer comes with a console-based GUI since version 1.0. You can see it in action here:

https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/gnu-guix-1.1.0-released/

I guess it depends on your definition of "GUI". :-)

OK, this much GUI is enough for me to give it a try.

Why does anyone wants a Gui installer? It's a real question, not trolling. For example i would never use the Gui-Debian installer, instead i use the expert-text installer it's faster and not at all "expert'ish".

People are intimidated by CLIs. Simple as that

Textinstallers NOT CLI's

https://i.stack.imgur.com/8OQdV.png

Intimated about text-installers but using something like Guix? Sound like a strange mindset.

I think most people would call a dialog driven installer running in a tty a GUI installer. They just don't want to be dumped into bash and told to set up GRUB on their own.

Alpine's installer is the best IMO: you get a GUI style wizard but it's contained in a set of shell scripts (setup-*) so if you need it again you can run it yourself.

OpenBSD is another goodie. Answer a number of prompts and then it installs and configs stuff in one go (no more prompts midway through or afterwards). Plus you can "preload" your answers by referring to a file, good if you admin many machines.

Haven't tried Arch or other cli installers yet.

Edit: Also, I just want things to work these days. I'm not interested in learning some installer tool's commands that I'm never going to use again.

Not talking about arch...talking about text-installers like debian, openbsd etc. There is no learning involved just TAB, Space and Enter.

Text installers work for me. Thanks.

Discoverability.

I am very comfortable on CLI, and will always prefer it over GUI for most tasks, but for OS installations, GUI is vastly superior. From the get go, if installer loads with GUI, you know that you likely won't see black screen on first boot. All the drives can be easily formatted (I always multi-boot) and there is no mental translation of how much space is used in which drive under what layout.

These 2 are my primary reasons. Apart from that, if something goes wrong during setup, GUI installer almost always comes with full browser available right there for looking IP errors, eliminating need for second device. With CLI installers, there usually isn't a DE included. (NixOS disk comes with full DE option, but CLI installer, making it a hybrid, not sure about GuixSD)

Except with NixOS the whole point is system configuration in one file. Assuming you're comfortable getting on a network and partitioning a disk, there's not much need for a GUI.

At work, with multiple machines with little difference, an experienced admin will just clone or fork a Git repository, format a full disk, and run the installation command.

A gui installer would be fun, but an installation process that fixed all the weird quirks (like with LANG settings) by default would also go a long way to making it more approachable.

Guix is amazing, all the awkwardness aside.

Guix installer was the first time I experienced the info documentation available "side-by-side" with the CLI (that is, `info` was already open on a separate tty). So obvious in retrospect. Gentoo is another nice installer but much clumsier as they make you actually connect to gentoo.org with `links` to find the installation guide (when you may not have the internet working).

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