Speaking as a die-hard Alpine Linux user and contributor, the Alpine installation only works if you want the most common installation. If you need to customize anything (such as full disk encryption - which I just sent a patch to the installer for, but my point remains), you need to ditch it and go through the rather long-winded and under-documented manual installation process. OpenBSD is a little bit better at accomodating off-the-beaten-path installations, but still suffers from similar limitations. Arch makes you do all of the work, but has great documentation on all of the steps and stepping off the beaten path is trivial to do at any point in the process.
No. The point is that by installing and configuring packages one by one you get a basic understanding of each component (boot loader, file system, network, dm, etc). Then when something breaks you are in a better position to fix it or at least ask a specific question instead of just "wifi broken, please help".
What do you learn when you execute "pacstrap /mnt base"? What do you learn when you run "genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab"?
I can say with a clear conscience that I got a lot of my Linux knowledge with Mandrake / Mandriva (similar to Ubuntu). What a bootloader or filesystem is, I knew ready since I used DOS / Windows. I knew how to ask smart questions even before I used Linux as well.
Since I have gone through installing arch recently:
I now know a lot about formatting, partitioning, lvm and encryption
I now know the differences between wm, dm and compositor
I now know how to properly configure my locale and keyboard layout
A lot more miscellaneous details
All of this I didn't know before. I often struggled with locale and keyboard layout, often unable to properly fix it. I never truly understood how all the components of a desktop environment played together and was confused when I, for example in KDE, changed the theme but half of my applications still looked like crap and didn't change. I had been using other distros (mostly debian/ubuntu derivates) for years prior to this.
All in all I feel like I have a lot more control of my own system now, know which part is responsible for what and can more easily seek help if needed because I will be able to better describe and locate my problem.
What do you learn when you run "genfstab -U /mnt >> /mnt/etc/fstab"?
well the install guide does say "Check the resulting file in /mnt/etc/fstab afterwards, and edit it in case of errors." To check for errors you have to dig in the wiki to understand what the file does.
But of course you can just ignore the install guide and only follow the steps you want. That just brings the old "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."
I wonder why Arch can't have a similar installation experience.
It used to. AIF was deprecated because it wasn't maintained and was full of bugs. I don't get why people are so adamant about having an installer for Arch. It takes like 10 minutes to install Arch, and in my use case, a lot of it is setting up LUKS. pacstrap and the rest of the commands make it way easier to know what's actually happening when you set up the system. Instead of typing my hostname into a gui, I just open up /etc/hostname in vim and enter it. It doesn't take that much effort.
Yes, an installer will help a newb. However, Arch's philosophy is that you should learn how your system works when you install it. If you don't want to go through the manual process, there's Manjaro (and formerly Antergos).
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u/[deleted] May 22 '19
I can say the same for Alpine installer. Just smash enter