Since calamares codes are way scarier than Conjuring and Veronica combined im embarking on a journey to make a TUI based installer since many people nowadays are preferring CLI for installing their systems and i chose rust the most hated language by me because it has something called ratatui-rs which is a TUI lib to create awesome TUIs , my plans for the installer would be:
Be strictly KISS
Have easy configs rather than mess in seperate dirs like calamares has 2 files in different dirs one in /usr and one in /etc there can be more i dont know
Open for adding and removing modules
However if you do want to contribute… You can soon i will create a repo, If you have any more suggestions , you can drop them!
It’s fine for you to work on making your own installer, but you ought to be able to do it without disparaging other projects or developers.
The Calamares installer is insanely flexible and can support tons of different installation scenarios. Not for nothing, but it seems unlikely you will be able to make something as robust and extensible as Calamares if your TUI installer is meant to be a casual project to learn some rust or whatever.
Well, cannot actually verify that statement, but the majority of systems using CLI installers are the grandest Linux distros (by grandest I mean Debian, Arch, Gentoo, Void, Slackware) and some obscure OS’s for which there are big chances that no-one beyond the creators has ever heard of.
Wish you luck on creating a new installer, but tbh, if we are to convince more people to use Arch-based GNU/Linux environment, my point is we should focus on delivering the paradigm most people are accustomed to, which is mainly mouse-focused and leave command-line installation for vanilla Arch padawans.
I personally have faced and was quite annoyed by that “GRUB failed to install” bug of Calamares a few times.
But the sentiment that Calamares is bad is, quite honestly, insane…
Calamares has been one of the cleanest / simplest and to-the-point install experiences I’ve had.
If you find their code to be bad, you can just contribute to it by improving it in small, digestible bits. I’m sure both the dev team and Calamares’ userbase will appreciate that a lot (as long as you approach it respectfully).
In any case, if you decide to build your own thing, I’ll also agree with @erne.d.98 's point (which commented while I was typing this), that a GUI focused installer is probably better. If you want to empower the “advanced few” even more, then it’s probably better to simply add to your main GUI-based installer an automation system like Anaconda’s kickstart (or, I believe OpenSUSE’s Yast AutoYast is equivalent…? Not sure if/how they worked on something equivalent for the new Agama…)
100% agree. Replacing Calamares is a BAD idea, in my opinion. I suppose there would be nothing wrong with having a CLI installer as an OPTION in the live ISO environment. But simply “replacing” Calamares with a CLI installer is a non-go as far as I’m concerned.
