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Comment by 5e92cb50239222b | Hacker News Reader

I think you misunderstood the point of the distribution. There's no installer because Arch developers have no need of one. They're creating the distribution for themselves, and if you find it useful (I do), that's great. There's no expectation that an "average technically literate joe" is going to use it because he's not in its target group.

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Arch isn't some small LFS niche distro anymore. At a certain point, you have to embrace at least some small amount of usability, or at least not reject PRs to add it. I found it quite embarrassing when one of the most popular distros out there had a worse installer than deb or slack from 20 years ago. That's not 'oops we forgot', it's not 'it was never really a priority' that's blatant user hostile elitism.

actually no you don't have to go change your project's philosophy bc different ppl start using it and demand different stuff. this is the kind of attitude that makes ppl hate maintaining FOSS anything.

> blatant user hostile elitism

...and that's a feature. There's nothing wrong with Arch doing its thing, there's always Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/Manjaro/whatever - and Gentoo for those with taste.

It's "maintaining an installer is a tedious chore I don't want to do as my hobby." Not elitism, eventually they did attract someone who wanted to maintain an installer as their hobby and now they have archinstall.

Any decent installer is non-trivial code and you cannot expect unpaid volunteers to write or maintain code that they don’t want to write or maintain.

I don’t see what the size of the distro has to do with it. Regardless of size, if there are users who have the time commitment and knowledge necessary to get commit rights and build and maintain an installer (as there is now), then it will have one. Otherwise it will not.

There’s no user hostility necessary for this sequence of events to happen.

That is only true if the Arch developers seek user growth beyond the niche they currently have. You are not entitled to them spending their time to meet your demand, though you are free to build your own distribution on top of it (or use one of the many available ones).

I don't think you should be embarrassed. An offer to provide code review, continuing development, and community support for this new feature is quite generous of you. They might not have decided to prioritize it, but at least you can be proud of the fact that you aren't just nitpicking from the sidelines, right?

> that's blatant user hostile elitism

A small amount of elitism is okay. For example, the Arch Wiki requires users to run a simple command before it allows them to create an account:

  pacman -V|base32|head -1

That command more or less proves the user has successfully installed Arch Linux. People who can't provide that output probably shouldn't be editing the wiki. I realize it's nowhere near a perfect proof but it's probably fine for the wiki's purposes.

You just proved parent's point.

Except there is an installer now, so your arguments against it are moot.

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