Great news. The idea of having an installation process as a gatekeeper is laughable. The more people who get access to Arch the better. It is the best distro in my opinion.
I also find the it kind of ironic that the Arch community want effortless hidpi scaling but aren’t willing to let people into there elitist gated community.
But manual Arch installation is really more like "teaching a man to fish" -- and in that way is the opposite of gatekeeping. Anyone with the curiosity and patience gets to have their hand held through a learning process with all of the intricacies explained and context given for the user to make their own decisions along the way.
That said, I welcome the installer option as well. Once you've been through the manual process a few times, it becomes less about the journey and more about the destination.
That would be the case if they hadn't thrown out the beginner's installation guide. What they have now is completely generic and largely useless for anybody who needs some amount of guidance or explanation. The current guide is basically throwing somebody into the deep-end and saying "here's this wiki page on how to swim, have fun". I pretty much gave up on Arch entirely after that fiasco.
The current situation isn't some kind of gatekeeping move to keep n00bs out. There has been an installer for years in the past, but it wasn't maintained anymore; keeping the distribution with some wiki pages to help people was certainly better than to completely stop any installation until an alternative was found.
I like the manual install method of Arch. I guess if their plan is to increase market share this is a good move but the manual install method represented a small bit of nice gatekeeping for the distro.
There was always a number of wiki articles and tutorials that helped people but it still wasn't new user friendly simple level. Other distributions that had easier interfaces easier installation methods were great for teaching people and keeping the training wheels on or allowing them to cut their teeth on so to speak. The other distros also have communities a built around onboarding new users and answering a new user questions. Once they were able to understand those basics and the few problems that need to be overcome on a daily use basis moving to Arch becomes quite simple after that.
Hopefully this doesn't flood the community with issues or questions that the community doesn't want to deal with.
I have had to keep a notes.txt file around because I don't install often enough to remember what choices I made last time.
That said, I think it was a good (hard) experience installing arch the first few times, and I'm a little conflicted.
Is this like the doctors saying "residents should be sleep deprived like I was at their age"... is it good experience or is it clinging to outdated ways?
> Other distributions that had easier interfaces easier installation methods were great for teaching people and keeping the training wheels on or allowing them to cut their teeth on so to speak.
You can use the Arch install process on other distros with tools like debootstrap (for Debian) or febootstrap (for Fedora). The nice thing about Arch is that they went to great length to document that particular workflow and make it a bit more accessible to casual users.
Wow, it's about time after the deprecation of the old installer. NOT saying the actual way is bad, but manjaro and stuff shows the need for a easy install.
An "old" installation is a nice gateway from people who might want to 3-click install Ubuntu or Manjaro. With this move causality of arch users will skyrocket imo
I also find the it kind of ironic that the Arch community want effortless hidpi scaling but aren’t willing to let people into there elitist gated community.
Linux is not a platform for elitism.