On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 12:25 AM, Niki Kovacs <info at microlinux.fr> wrote: > A *user* never has to even see - or use - an installer. A USER has to USE a > computer, by which I mean the applications he or she needs to get some work > done. This is a false dichotomy. I reject it. There's too much fact to the contrary. My mom has done an OS installation, she is most definitely not an admin. > > The person who gets to be confronted by an OS installer is not a user, it's > an ADMIN, which is an entirely different thing. Well, you're wrong. I'd say you have never used a Windows or OS X installer, they're a piece of cake. My house plant could do an installation. Anaconda isn't absurdly far behind that experience when it comes to automatic installs (to blank drives). >An ADMIN should RTFM (a lot) > and know his way about what you call "esoteric things" earlier in this > thread (disks, partitions, volumes). Sure. But GUI installers are general purpose tools for admins and user use alike. If you care about things like partition tables and their type codes, you aren't very well suited for using a GUI installer. > My company (http://www.microlinux.fr) installs complete Linux-based networks > for schools, town halls, public libraries etc. here in South France. For > now, most of my server and desktop solutions are based on a highly modified > version of Slackware Linux, with some CentOS and some RHEL here and there. > I'm currently planning on migrating everything to CentOS in the long run. > > One of the founding principles of my company is the constant SEPARATION > BETWEEN USING A COMPUTER AND ADMINISTRATING IT. A user never ever has to > worry about things that pertain to system administration, and it would be > very wrong if he or she ever has to deal with such a thing as an installer. > For what it's worth, some of my users don't even know that this thing that > they're using every day is called Linux under the hood. To them, it's just > the machine that's running things like their library management software, or > whatever. It sounds like a mobile device running cyanogen, except there is no clear line between user and administrating it. I'm not a big fan of this separation between admin and computers when it comes to basic plumbing type stuff like getting a working OS installed. That should be something either really easy or totally unnecessary like a stateless machine that can be reset and self heal. The fact desktop haven't caught up to mobile in this regard, is sorta embarassing. Actually, Windows 8 comes fairly close to having statelessness, once it's installed by a conventional installer. But not OS X. Notice how Android, cyanogen don't even have monolithic installers. I'm just not a fan of needing such a thing in the first place these days, it's antiquated. > > So, as an admin, what I want from an installer is FLEXIBILITY... and not an > "assistant" that reminds me of Microsoft Office's infamous Clippy and > expects me to jump through burning loops to configure the system as I want > it. What you're describing is what kickstart is for. That's flexible and fairly bug free. GUI installers, the more complex you make them (flexibility) the buggier they are. Fedora Atomic, one possible way of the future without any installer. Atomic updates, and rollback and rollfoward. http://www.projectatomic.io/ And another using btrfs send/receive images (not mentioned but could instead use seed devices): http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linux-systems.html -- Chris Murphy