[arch-general] Good press at distrowatch.com

[Denis Kobozev]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 12:50 AM, David C. Rankin
<drankinatty at suddenlinkmail.com>
> Seriously, I like the Arch installer just fine, but I can tell you that the
> Ubuntu/SuSE install rating most likely come from the fact that the gui
> installers they employ are easy on the eye and they have put a lot of effort
> into automating the difficult parts of the install procedure that most new
> users don't understand --> the partitioning.

Partitioning was scary for me precisely because many systems try to
hide it from the user. The data that you have might be more valuable
to you than your machine. The automated partitioning tool might or
might not do the right thing. And if it screws up, you have no idea
what went wrong and how to deal with it.

A short anecdote. Several years ago, I decided to install Ubuntu (my
first "real" distro, as opposed to a LiveCD) on my desktop. I had two
drives: 500 GiB, where my Windows install and other files lived, and
an old 80 GiB drive, for Ubuntu installation. During the install,
Ubuntu overwrote MBR on the 500 GiB drive and installed Ubuntu and
GRUB on the 80 GiB one. Long story short, all was fine until I decided
to remove the 80 GiB drive with Ubuntu from my machine - without it,
Windows wouldn't boot due to missing GRUB. And in order to make the
machine bootable again, I had to spend a considerable amount of time
reading about bootloaders, GRUB, MBRs, partitions and all that.

My point is that I'm not at all convinced that automating the
difficult parts is the way to go. It might be preferred by some, but
I'm not sure that they know what they're missing (I didn't). You will
have to know what you are doing sooner or later.

I'm also not convinced that people who do not wish to read about
partitioning should install OSs on their own, but hey, what do I know
:)