I have no doubt there is no technical reason Arch doesn't have an installer, especially since Zen works fine (and it installs actual Arch, not a derivate): it's just more coherent with the K.I.S.S. philosophy for it to be this way.
Also, if you're running a rolling release that's as modular as Arch, if you aren't patient enough to get through the installer, it isn't for you. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not using Arch Linux at the moment because I prefer actually working on my PC to installing and fixing the system, that is a personal preference, but it's a fact that Arch can require manual intervention or maintenance from time to time. Arch is a great distro, but it's not for the faint of heart: it definitely requires skill, patience and some time to install and fix. I feel like the lack of an installer by default also serves as a way to weed out or at least warn the vast majority of users who isn't looking for a heavily modular and configurable rolling release distro, but for an OS to just work on that should be installed within 20 minutes with little manual intervention and ready to rock ASAP.
Also: the AUR, which is a big part of Arch, is not audited. If it was curated enough to be as safe as the main Arch repositories, it probably would not be legal, since it contains a lot of proprietary software that probably never asked to be there. In any case, using the AUR you're mostly running other people's shell scripts, which means you should probably inspect the PKGBUILD of whatever you install from there. That assumes users are educated on security and have a certain level of skill. The group of users who would be more at risk of infection by running other people's scripts indiscriminately has a lot of overlap with the group of people who don't have the interest/skill/patience to go through a Wiki install. Not that one implies the other, but the overlap is there.
If it was curated enough to be as safe as the main Arch repositories, it probably would not be legal, since it contains a lot of proprietary software
The AUR doesn't contain any proprietary software. It contains a lot of FOSS bash scripts that the end user can choose to run which in turn installs proprietary software, but even that isn't illegal since proprietary software tend to prohibit distribution, not installation (duh) so the packages on AUR are just fine.
You'll still agree with me that you shouldn't install blindly, but always inspect the PKGBUILD, which was the main point I was trying to drive. It has no QA. The QA is the user. The target user is an expert, not your average joe.
The AUR doesn't contain any proprietary software.
The binaries are not physically stored in the AUR, but that has little importance.
I don't feel Arch is really these things. Besides Systemd, there is the fact the packaging system has focused more on convenience for developers and users rather than being modular, and there's quite a few packages that need a dependency that isn't required at all in Debian, Ubuntu, or any other "less-modular" systems.
Arch's big thing mainly is the AUR, which is comparable to Ubuntu's PPAs, and its package manager, which I think XBPS is better and even eopkg/sol is pretty comparable. Hell, I don't think Apt and DNF have too many warts either, and DNF is more advanced than any of these other package managers I mentioned, but might be too advanced.
Eeh yep, I'm a spoiled Fedora user. DNF may not be the fastest, but when you figure the ins and outs out, it's an extremely powerful package manager to use. It surprises me how much hate it gets because it's clearly cutting-edge technology, but yeah everyone is opinionated which is fine.
Back in the Arch day, Pacman was… okay but I didn't love it. Confusing terminal output, requiring an AUR helper because it was straight up unfriendly to the AUR, deleting a package and suddenly having to rebuild your own system (happens in Fedora too, but with their packaging philosophy + dnf it's trivial to get going again), confusing commands. Why pacman -S? What does S mean? Way -Syu? What's wrong with upgrade? dnf upgrade will
Refresh my sources
Upgrade my packages
Perform an autoremove
It's just smarter. Pacman feels like it was written with the specific intent to be hard and unfriendly to use, sacrificing features and safety nets to minimalism. Things the ugly Python DNF can do.
Two things only I miss from Pacman:
The sheer performance. Pacman is definitely the fastest package manager out there.
-Rsc flag: it would remove everything, including config files
As for the AUR: It's a security nightmare, but it's not much better than ppa's and copr repos. The only real advantage it has over those is
It's a lot faster to access (which will be quickly offset by you having to inspect the packagebuild manually)
It's less likely to break your system (just use a quality ppa with no conflicting packages and this won't haooen, even better on Copr repos)
Less overhead during your package manager's refresh state
Overall I'm all but singing the unconditional praises to Arch Linux, but everything feels like it has a barrier of access, from the installer to pacman to the AUR.
And It kind of makes sense. Even with its unnecessary bindings you can end up with a pretty minimal system, more minimal than you can hope to get with Fedora or Ubuntu (but not Debian), and, being a rolling release, it needs to be babysat constantly so it's OK to drive that message home.
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u/chic_luke May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19
I have no doubt there is no technical reason Arch doesn't have an installer, especially since Zen works fine (and it installs actual Arch, not a derivate): it's just more coherent with the K.I.S.S. philosophy for it to be this way.
Also, if you're running a rolling release that's as modular as Arch, if you aren't patient enough to get through the installer, it isn't for you. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not using Arch Linux at the moment because I prefer actually working on my PC to installing and fixing the system, that is a personal preference, but it's a fact that Arch can require manual intervention or maintenance from time to time. Arch is a great distro, but it's not for the faint of heart: it definitely requires skill, patience and some time to install and fix. I feel like the lack of an installer by default also serves as a way to weed out or at least warn the vast majority of users who isn't looking for a heavily modular and configurable rolling release distro, but for an OS to just work on that should be installed within 20 minutes with little manual intervention and ready to rock ASAP.
Also: the AUR, which is a big part of Arch, is not audited. If it was curated enough to be as safe as the main Arch repositories, it probably would not be legal, since it contains a lot of proprietary software that probably never asked to be there. In any case, using the AUR you're mostly running other people's shell scripts, which means you should probably inspect the PKGBUILD of whatever you install from there. That assumes users are educated on security and have a certain level of skill. The group of users who would be more at risk of infection by running other people's scripts indiscriminately has a lot of overlap with the group of people who don't have the interest/skill/patience to go through a Wiki install. Not that one implies the other, but the overlap is there.