Arch Guided Installer Is Finally Amazing!!!

back in april i made a video about the official arch guided installer which was first included with the iso back on april 1st and because it was an absolute joke i completely tore it apart now some people said i was being too harsh on it or some of the ways i caused it to crash were going to be the fault of the user but if you enter a b instead of an a and then your program crashes that's not a problem with the user that is a problem with the program now this video became fairly popular i think it's the most popular video on the arch guided installer so i felt like i had to do a follow-up the dev saw that original video and this dev i have to say is an absolute legend he didn't agree with every single problem i brought up but when it came to the usability issues and the bugs that it had he was like okay i probably should fix this this shouldn't have been released in the state that it was in i gave him a couple of months to fix it and you know what if this is the state it was originally in that would have been a completely different video the guided installer is actually good now let's go and have a look then so if we go and run arch install arch install is included with any version of the iso after april 1st you don't have to go and like download anything or anything like that it'll just be there from the start this will first bring up the keyboard layout selected now if we go and press enter without including an input that is going to select the us layout which is perfectly fine us layout is a fairly common keyboard layout but if we go and enter let's say 27 which is outside of the range here or 37 i guess selected option is out of range good okay let's go and enter a language that isn't in the list given language wasn't found this is how it should have acted by default now this isn't every single keyboard layout that is supported if we go and enter the question mark key that is going to bring us into a search prompt now i do have one problem with the search prompt it doesn't really indicate to you besides starting with sv what might actually be included so unless you already know the name the thing you're looking for finding something with this prompt really isn't gonna be that easy but if we actually go into that prompt and then we don't actually want to use it typing exit is going to take us back to this first page where we can go and enter a language for now though we're just going to use the us layout so the next step is going to get us select the country to download our packages from and obviously australia being the best country is at the top now this has the same level of error handling that we saw in the first part if we enter something outside the range we get that one enter something not on the list then we get that one works as it should nothing else to really say about this next up is selecting the disk to install archon so if we go and enter something out of the range does that enter something that's not on the list does that good as we'd expect but it also has the option where if you don't select a drive it's going to use whatever is currently mounted at slash m t and then use that to set up arch it does say it's experimental i have not tested this myself so i cannot confirm how well this is going to work but most people are probably gonna want to do a clean install in my case i'm gonna go with dev sda which is on option one then we get the option to go and select our file system error handling still works the exact same way now i have a different problem with this than when i first talked about it so previously this was in alphabetical order and that was fine with butterfest being at the top now it is not in alphabetical order but butterfest is still at the top what that is implying to me is that that is being treated as the default option now if you've ever read the arch linux documentation you would know that ext4 is basically the standard way to set up your file system it's not that butterfest can't be used or butterfest is bad it's just not the default choice i would personally put ext4 at the top or give it a label saying default the reason why labels are going to be fine is because in later parts of the application it is actually using a label for a default choice one thing i haven't tested before now is what happens if we don't enter an option and as you can probably see here not entering something is going to force us to actually select a value i think that's a good way to handle it to make sure it doesn't pick a file system that you don't want to use in my case i am going to use ext4 i don't really care about using disk encryption so i'm going to leave that blank then it's going to ask us for a host name let's go and set that one to brody then we can set a root password but if we go and leave that blank then it won't actually have a root account and as it says here it's making a recommendation so the developer isn't against making recommendations in places where they feel like they are useful but doesn't make a recommendation when it comes to the file system i am going to enter a root password just because i prefer to have your root account but if you want to go with what the dev says then you know you can just not bother enabling it that actually wasn't intentional but if you do mess up your password it will give you an error message after that if you want to have a user account which you probably should then you can go and add one i am going to add one named brody i'm going to go and enter a password for that and then once that is done i believe okay firstly we can decide if it's going to be a pseudoer i'm going to make this a to us so someone who can actually run sudo and then it's going to prompt us to make any extra users i'm just going to leave this blank and press enter and then it's going to prompt us to actually set up our desktop profile and this is actually a really cool feature if you go through this step without selecting anything you're still going to have some packages installed i believe without anything selected you'll get bass and bass devel and any of the other like basic required packages but if you want to have say gnome pre-installed or i3 or kde or anything like that you can go and select the desktop profile and then select which one you want to use but maybe you just want to have say just xorg or just the software useful on a server well then you can go and select one of those instead i'm gonna go with the desktop option just so i can show you a problem that it has so this has a list of things that are pre-set up they're perfectly fine options i don't like that when you install i3 it installs it with a uh a display manager but it's fine it gets i3 working that's all that matters a problem here is uh there's no way to go back so there's no like exit command here doesn't exist if we just press enter we can't do that so from this point we are stuck here it probably should have the same exit option that we saw on the search earlier for now though i'm just going to install i3 then it's going to prompt us for the version of i3 so any cases like i3 it will give you this option i'm going to go with option 0 for i3 gaps and then it's going to prompt us for our graphics drivers now on the minimal and server options this prompt will not be shown because you're installing a minimal setup or you're installing something on a server you don't necessarily need those drivers one thing i should have mentioned before is previously the way that these categories up here were being handled was not at all so things like i think kde were at the top level rather than inside of the desktop profile so this listing in these categories have been really cleaned up and they actually mean what you'd expect them to mean now now for the graphics drivers section this has really been cleaned up so previously it was referring to the drivers based on the driver names not the companies that the drivers were actually supporting so now we have amd intel nvidia and then the vmware and virtualbox option i don't think that was in the list before so in my case i'm going to select that one but there's one option in here that i don't understand all open source so as we can see a couple of the drivers are marked as being open source presumably what that means is it's going to install all of the open source drivers but i don't know why you would do that because you wouldn't want to install drivers for a car that you don't have i should mention that the nvidia option does include both the open source and the proprietary drivers so you can select which one you want to use it's not going to just force you to pick the proprietary when you don't want them problem that we saw before though is we can't go and exit out of this menu though so i'm going to get us back to this point so i can select the correct drivers once you've selected your drivers this is a really cool addition it's going to prompt you to use either pipe wire or pulse audio it's going to install one of them by default you can obviously remove pulse audio later if you don't want it but this is just how it's going to do it i personally don't like pipe wire in the state that it's in so i'm gonna say no but this is a really really good option to have now the next option is selecting which kernel you want to use and this is where it gets kind of weird again you can probably tell this interface is completely different from any of the ones we've seen before and i feel like that is the biggest problem this application currently has some parts the application work in some way we can press exit to go back some parts don't have an exit then other parts like this one you can go and enter values and it keeps you on the screen until you go and press enter so if i want to go and enable say like the hardened kernel and the lts kernel i can go and do that and then selecting the value again is going to go and disable that for now though i'm just going to press enter to use the linux kernel now we're at the point where we can select any extra packages we may want to download so by default you're going to get base based eval linux linux firmware and it says efi boot manager but that is a bug so previously this only worked on uefi systems but now this system right here this this vm i'm running is running bios and when you're using bios it is going to install grub uefi it will use efi boot manager though so keep that in mind now i know that most people are using widescreen monitors and not a four by three vm but line breaks exist on a 16 9 monitor i don't want to read a line that goes across my entire screen just add a line break in after like basterville and it will be much easier to read to download extra packages we use a space separated list so let's go and download vim nano and blah blah blah blah and give it a second it should go and error out and say this package does not exist but it doesn't tell you the other packages also don't exist so it goes and checks that okay vim nano those are real this one what are you saying for now though i'm just going to install vim so from here it's going to go and verify that then we can go and select how we actually want to do our networking if you've set up something custom in the iso you can go and copy those settings you can go and download network manager and have that go and do everything for you that's the way i prefer doing stuff or you can just say hey this is your network device set it up that this is the network device to be using i'm not sure how that option is gonna work it might go and download something like dhcpd but network manager is probably going to be the best thing to use i'm going to enter one and then we have to go and select a time zone now time zones are still as broken as they used to be they don't error out when you enter the wrong value but there's no easy way to search for them and as we saw earlier there is clearly already a working search functionality so that should probably be included here as well now when it comes to the time zone you can't just go and enter you know acst jst pst anything like that utc is an exception you have to go and enter you know australia slash adelaide or australia brisbane and there is an example of that being here but if you're in some like weird sub time zone having that search option there would be very useful once you've entered the time zone it's going to prompt you to do ntp time synchronization there's really no reason not to do this i'm going to say why and then it's gonna prompt you to actually look at the things you've gone and set up so i know that everything i've entered is fine i'm gonna press enter and then it's gonna go and start doing the installation and this is where there has been another really really nice change so previously once you got to the like the installation bit there was no output so if it took 15 20 30 an hour you actually wouldn't know how long it's going for now as we can see it just shows the pac-man output and we can see how long stuff is taking to download it is freaking out a little bit but i think that's more about uh the tty not about the application itself if it is the application that probably should be fixed but the fact there is output there is perfectly fine just to prove it is using grub as we can see right here grub is being installed right now and i'll cut back to when it's actually done now once it's finished installing everything for me it took about five or so minutes it's then gonna prompt you to go and to root into your new installed system but if we go and press no then we can go and just reboot and then open up the system like that as you can see no errors we may now reboot removing the iso and then starting up the system should go and start it up exactly the way we'd expect so it's giving us a grub prompt okay arch linux is being detected and once that's gone and loaded because i selected the i3 profile we're going to be shown a uh a display manager i don't like to see it but it is going to show its and here we are i'm just going to log in as brody and go and enter my password and that should go on login assuming i didn't forget my password okay we're good i3 is working so everything's working as it should be as i said earlier if this was a state that was originally in when i first tested it this video would not exist and that video would have been very very positive the guided installer in its current state while i do have some issues with you know the weird ui stuff and there's some slight usability issue that does have overall it is really really good and if this is the way that you install arch there is no problem with that whatsoever i will be keeping up that previous video basically for historical purposes and to show what a dev can do if they are actually willing to listen to feedback this went from being completely unusable to being an amazing application in a couple of months honestly this is probably going to be the way that i install art from now on because i don't really care to go through the rest of the process so if you like this video and you want to support the channel and become one of these amazing people over here please go check out my patreon subscribe stanley bear pay link in the description down below i've got a podcast called tech over t available basically anywhere i've got a gaming channel called brody robertson plays where i live stream twice a week upload about five or so youtube shorts and this channel is also available over on odyssey that's gonna be it for me and i'm out [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Brodie Robertson

Views: 27,924

Rating: 4.9099998 out of 5

Keywords: brodie robertson, brodie robertson linux, linux, arch linux, arch install, arch guided install, arch guided installer, how to install arch, how to install arch linux, how to install linux, arch, arch installer, best linux software, software showcase, best linux apps, best linux applications, tty, linux tty, linux terminal, brodie robertson arch linux, arch linux brodie robertson

Id: 8mC5IHh-dj8

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021