Linked by Paul Hankes Drielsma on Tue 15th Apr 2003 06:40 UTC
I can't take anymore comments like "Debian/Gentoo/OpenBSD/etc. are not good/user-friendly because they lack a graphical installer." Searching the web, I couldn't find a comprehensive site describing the good and the bad about graphical installers for various OSes throughout the years, so in this article I hope to debunk a few of the myths on the basis of my own personal and professional experience.
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Linux installers have come a long way in the past few years. There are still a few things that need to be worked on, but they're approaching a very polished and refined state. But I myself prefer Linux From Scratch. LFS isn't hard to install; it just takes a user with more intelligence than an eggplant, who has the ability to follow directions. Now, what I'd like to see is a LiveCD-based ncurses/graphical LFS installer that lets you install an optimized LFS system, without having any other OS on your machine. It'd let you create/edit partitons; choose to use an autogenerated set of config files, or code your own; that sort of thing. It could use the partiton with /usr/src on it to compile the packages, and it could just download whatever package it needed. Like some bastard child of Mandrake and Gentoo. Imagine if Gentoo had Mandrake's installer, with emerge support. Now that'd be cool, IMHO.