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Comment by tucosan | Hacker News Reader

> I don't even want to install Arch the Arch way.

Then don't. You're simply not part of the target audience.

I don't wanna install Arch the Arch way either, and I've been running Arch for over 10yrs

The Installation just sucks for no purpose. Actually it's worse than that they used to have a TUI installer but then removed it

> Actually it's worse than that they used to have a TUI installer but then removed it

Not sure what you're referring to here. Archinstall [1] is relatively recent [2]. I used it a few weeks ago to quickly yeet a machine into Arch for some testing. Worked flawlessly and had the machine from live boot -> Arch install on root media in under 5 minutes.

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-Does-Archinstall

Arch had some CLI installer ~10 years ago.

I remember using TUI for Arch installation 10+ years ago. I think it also was named archinstall iso back then. But it had some limitations. I do prefer the way it is right now though, it seems rather simple.

It’s stable and simple. I can run through it in 20 minutes including disk encryption and X.

They have a command line installer, just type archinstall and it will ask a few questions then do the rest for you.

This.

I have used the script and it pretty much lines up with the 'arch' way and I believe it is still a good introduction to linux.

They had a TUI installer which was just a rebranded `bsdinstall` from FreeBSD. They got rid of it around ~2009 IIRC because it was objectively bad and they moved away from doing releases. Nowadays they've added a new installer, and as far as people told me it's way better. I still install Arch the Arch way, of course, or rather, I haven't installed Arch since 2014, I've been `rsync`-ing stuff around for a while until 2017, and then `zfs send`-ing the same install over from one computer to another. It's faster and less annoying than setting everything up from scratch IMHO.

The installation is minimal because arch is a minimal developer effort distro. Think of arch as a bunch of devs making a distribution for themselves and if anyone else happens to use it, that's fine. It makes a lot of their decisions make a lot more sense.

Just use endeavourOS, it's basically arch with a nice installer and sane defaults.

The Arch install is literally 1. partition your system 2. mount / 3. run 1 command to actually install the system 4. install grub

Sure, it's a bit gatekeepy if you haven't done it before, but it teaches you a lot of useful things about how a Linux system works, that you'll undoubtedly need if you plan to use Arch.

Imagine any other consumer product boasting about teaching you things, instead of just do what it means to do.

Also am I dumb? Why do I need to be taught these things again and again every damn installation?

That's because Arch is not a consumer product. It is an enthusiast Linux project, perhaps a bit too hyped up, that is usually manually installed because that's the way it is.

It's manually installed because you build it up to be exactly what you want. If you don't know what you want - use Ubuntu.

> Imagine any other consumer product boasting about teaching you things, instead of just do what it means to do.

Plenty of consumer products does just this? Raspberry PI basically spawned an entire industry around this very idea. Bunch of analog musical instruments does the same, some even come with signal graphs and such to teach you the insides of the instrument.

You don't need to be taught again and again, you should just know it. I haven't had to install it in years but I bet I can get an usable system in 10 minutes.

I wouldn't mind a graphical installer but my point is that the install process reflects the experience of actually using it - it's a tinkerer's system, and from time to time you'll need to spend an hour reading the Wiki. If you're not willing to do it for the install, you'd probably also be miserable using the damn thing - the system is honest with what it is from the get go, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

You can write your own installer script that will set things up exactly how you want to do it, which many others have done so before, if going through the manual process every installation is tedious.

There's even the (not so official) archinstall script built into the live ISO if you want a guided installation process.

But the core philosophy of the distro is that it targets users with a certain base-level of competence in working with Linux and provides them a simple, close to bleeding-edge distro; so it does do what it means to do.

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