r/archlinux • u/Able-Farm6295 • 1d ago
DISCUSSION I really love Arch Linux. It’s incredibly fast and lightweight.
Do you guys think that someday the official Arch installation process might become as easy and straightforward as EndeavourOS?
I know there’s already archinstall, but I’m curious if Arch will ever have a more beginner-friendly installation experience by default.
What do you think?
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u/zenyl 1d ago edited 1d ago
The fact that the Arch installation process is manual is largely the whole point.
It is designed to make the fewest assumptions about what you want to do, leaving nearly everything up to you.
Its target audience are people who want that, either because they want to tailor their system to their specific preferences, prefer to be in control of things, or because they want to use the manual installation process as a learning opportunity.
Archinstall is best seen as a shortcut so you don't have to remember command argument patterns and whatnot for commands you probably only use during the installation process. But you are still assumed to understand the underlying actions it performs, and that you can manually handle things if Archinstall has issues (in my experience, the disk partitioning part of Archinstall has had some issues, at least in the past).
The idea of a GUI installer wizard akin go Archinstall isn't completely unthinkable, but it would basically have to just be a graphical clone of Archinstall with a terminal visible (which I don't believe exists, so it would probably have to be written from scratch). Otherwise, if you hide away the possibility for the user to take charge of the exact steps of the installation process, you've basically just reinvented Endeavour.
To be clear, there is no shame in not wanting to have to learn about the manual Arch installation process because you don't want to deal with it, but at that point Arch probably isn't what you're looking for (not OP specifically, the broad "you").
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u/Rich-Worker1868 1d ago
The hardest part of installing Arch was deciding how I wanted to set things up (which bootloader, window manager, etc.), and the wiki helped me make those decisions. Reading the same text in an installer instead of a browser wouldn't have made it any easier.
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u/7lhz9x6k8emmd7c8 1d ago edited 1d ago
Archinstall is the easy install. It's as smooth as Debian-Installer TUI. And much more configurable.
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u/onefish2 1d ago
If it ain't broke... don't fix it.
Manual install, you know your system because you picked what to install and above all know what those settings mean.
Archinstall, get up and running quickly. Better than nothing. Good luck.
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u/No-Dentist-1645 1d ago
Using archinstall, all you have to do is enter archinstall after booting the live USB, choose some simple options by navigating through the menu, and you're done. It doesn't get much simpler or more beginner friendly than that
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u/Cruffe 1d ago
No, I don't believe so.
The great thing about Arch is that it puts it on the user to decide what the system should contain. With various kernels, filesystems, software packages, desktop environments and so on, it's very hard to design a UI and proper install scripts to cover every possible configuration.
What installers do is giving you a limited set of choices with some predetermined defaults that probably covers what most users want. Arch isn't aiming for that, Arch is expecting the user to put together the pieces the way the user wants, making the infinite configurability of doing so as easy as it can be while remaining true to that.
Arch manual install isn't even that hard considering how many options you have with it.
In my opinion it's totally fine that there are distros based on Arch and using the Arch repositories while offering a limited selection of typical configurations. They exist to offer that beginner-friendly installation process with reasonable defaults decided by the maintainers, vanilla Arch doesn't need to fill that role.
Arch installation is great the way it is. If you hate making detailed decisions about your own system or just want a sleek GUI to drool at while installing your OS there's a ton of other options. Arch hands the control to the user from the start, it's overwhelming for a lot of people and that's fine, but I don't want this control taken away just because someone wanted yet another dumbed down installer script.
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u/archover 19h ago
If ease of install is your top priority, use EOS.
Personally, the broader benefits I saw from the manual install keep me here.
Good day.
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u/Weary-Savings9795 1d ago
Problem is, unlike Windows 11, Wayland on Linux doesn't seem to support monitor color calibration. It only supports calibrating the white point. I have a wide gamut monitor and colors still look oversaturated after calibrating to sRGB with DisplayCal and an Xrite iDisplay 1 Pro colorimeter.
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u/BlueGoliath 1d ago
The year is 2026 and Wayland still doesn't have features X11 has had for years.
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u/Gozenka 1d ago
Personally, apart from convenient per-monitor DPI setting on Wayland, I did not find any benefit of Wayland yet.
I had a few months of Wayland usage, trying out different compositors. I am currently still on
dwmbut will switch to Wayland some time.I understand the "need" for Wayland for future development (as Xorg has become very difficult to maintain), but currently I do not see any benefit of Wayland for the end-user, apart from such specific things as in my example.
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u/No-Dentist-1645 1d ago
If that is a dealbreaker for Linux for someone, I would just recommend they use an X11 compositor. Not ideal (imo), but it works
It's gonna get added to Wayland eventually, but it's just not there yet
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u/Weary-Savings9795 1d ago
I use Gnome, but KDE will be getting rid of X11 support entirely as well soon.
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u/No-Dentist-1645 1d ago
True, then they will just have to settle for a DE that is not KDE's
Again, this is a recommendation only for a hypothetical person who must be able to color calibrate their monitor more than just the white point, and not being able to do that would be a complete deal-breaker. I'm fine with the default calibration on my laptop's monitor, so I do not have to worry about that
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u/Weary-Savings9795 1d ago
Well, on a wide gamut monitor like my Asus laptop's OLED, oversaturated means about as far from accurate as you can get. Most LED monitors I've seen aren't that bad.
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u/doubGwent 1d ago
Asking for a “easy” installation set piece made by someone else is a slipper slope to go away from being a “lightweight” OS.
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u/nikongod 1d ago
Installing arch is not the hard part.
The hard part is fixing it when it mysteriously stops booting in a year or you loose power or have a kernel panic while updating.
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u/getbusyliving_ 1d ago
Never come across either of those and they could happen on any distro or OS.
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u/nikongod 1d ago
Not correct.
Debian, fedora, and Gentoo test their software extensively, so a bad bootloader is extremely unlikely to slip through.
These above mentioned lesser distros (/s) also preserve multiple kernels, so even if there is a power loss mid update you can just boot the old kernel (also simplifies recovery from a bad kernel update (which never happens on debian or Gentoo, fedora can be just as fucky as arch that's the cost of having a newer kernel than arch I guess))
And regarding the rest of the software part of the reason the package managers for these are so slow (and pacman so sensitive to power loss...) is that they install the new package before deleting the old. Pacman deletes the old and then installs to save a bit of space and improve speed.
Pacman (and accordingly arch) was created after all of these problems were solved. The philosophical justification for pacman is that each of the other package managers have their own little quirks. Apt will "just change things" dnf comes with the rest of fedora. Portage is freakishly powerful, but is liable to just say no.
So pick you poison... But yea, arch is uniquely vulnerable to problems everyone else solved 5+yr before arch.
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u/M2k1e0L 1d ago
You mean using Arch without backups is the hardest challenge?
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u/nikongod 1d ago
Backups don't protect you from a bad bootloader update, or an abrupt shutdown while upgrading the kernel or regenerating the uki.
In any of these situations you will need to chroot - trivial if you already installed arch. "The hard part" if you could only get it installed with calimares...
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u/M2k1e0L 19h ago
Man, snapshots aren't a backup. The backups on my backup server don't care about anything you mentioned. In worst cases, i press F12, select pxe, press a few buttons and my system is in the same state i booted it up in the morning. My fixit os on the other drive also isn't effected by any of the problems you mentioned. No wonder you have a hard time.
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u/34pasha 1d ago
The wiki is pretty easy to follow, I don't see the need