[somat]

Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.

[Flamingoat]

> Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.

> When I picked a linux distro to put on my system to play games on, the one I choose was void linux, why, mainly because the installer looks and feels directly ripped off from obsd.

Choosing distros based on the installer is kinda a bit silly. I've done a Linux From Scratch build and I can tell you there is very little difference between one distro an another.

[daneel_w]

>> Hard disagree, the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

> No not really. I recently took my friend through it and there is several places where it is pretty easy to screw something up. Whenever people say stuff like this, they are usually accustomed to the quirks.

Like what places, and how are they pretty easy to screw up on? I'm genuinely curious, as to me it's the cleanest and most straight-forward console installer I've ever experienced. I managed to get it done the very first time I, 25 years ago, with zero *nix experience, decided to try OpenBSD. Also, you can always exit the installer and restart the process. You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.

[Flamingoat]

> Like what places, and how are they pretty easy to screw up on? I'm genuinely curious, as to me it's the cleanest and most straight-forward console installer I've ever experienced.

To you it is. I installed on 3.8 and it was not straightforward. I used to go to university with a guy that used OpenBSD and he even said the installation at the time was straight forward. So it isn't just me.

I can't remember specifics as it was about 4-6 months. It was something to do with drive labelling IIRC, it was super confusing and I think I just ended up removing drives temporarily.

> you can always exit the installer and restart the process.

Nope. I tried that. It did not work.

> You're not "screwed" unless you reboot at the end without having reflected over your instructions.

Again it wasn't that straight forward.

[daneel_w]

> Nope. I tried that. It did not work.

The installer is a plain *sh script. You simply ctrl+c to break out and return to the shell, then run "install" to start the script again. I can't see why you would end up with an installation medium containing a different installer than everyone else.

[Flamingoat]

> The installer is a plain *sh script. You simply ctrl+c to break out and return to the shell, then run "install" to start the script again

I ended up in situation where that wasn't possible. I wasn't sure how that happened. But it did.

I have done many installations over the years on real hardware and VMs. It only happened once, but it can happen.

I could also bring up the issues with the auto partition layout that is suggest which can make impossible to install any larger of software after installation. Or how the disks can be confusingly labelled in some cases (especially in VMs).

The point being communicated is that it isn't as straightforward as many people claim.

I first started mucking about with it in like 3.8/3.9, and you had to do something which was very archaic (even for 20 years) with calculating partition size, so it has improved.

> I can't see why you would end up with an installation medium containing a different installer than everyone else.

I don't appreciate how you worded this.

I am not lying about my experience. I just can't remember the exact set of steps of what happened because it happened several months ago now.

[temp0826]

> very little difference between one distro an another

These days the differences come down to systemd or no systemd. I joke that we should refer to it all as SystemD/Linux (akin to how "GNU/Linux" was used).

[Flamingoat]

I did the LFS build with SysV init scripts. I think there is a systemd version of LFS. LFS was a good learning exercise to see generally how everything was put together. I wouldn't want to manually manage all of this myself.

If you look at the LFS compile instructions for each package they are essentially the same as the PKGBUILDs scripts in Arch, I suspect it is similar with Gentoo, Void or any other similar Linux distro.

[ninjin]

It feels like Alpine tries to imitate the OpenBSD installer somewhat as well, but it is just not the same as it forces you to make choices between SSH servers, NTP daemons, etc. So, it still very much feels like the Linux "pick and mix box". What makes OpenBSD so special is that there is one choice, it tends to be a good choice, and it is the only choice they will support and therefore they will put in the hours to make it solid.

[lproven]

> the Openbsd installer is the gold standard to which all other installers compare poorly.

Very hard disagree.

It took me half a dozen installs in VMs before I dared try on hardware. I never managed to get the Arm64 version installed at all, due to the cryptic minimalist info the installer gave me, which wasn't anywhere near enough to go on.

I have it on hardware now. It took a day or 2 of work but now it runs it's totally stable. However, the Byzantine partitioning scheme it uses means that although I gave it 32GB of disk, I don't have enough disk space to install Xfce.

It is on a Thinkpad W500, on a ~250GB SSD, multibooting with WinXP64, and NetBSD 10, and both Crunchbang++ Linux and Alpine Linux.

I tend to find that people who praise the installer tell me that it's never crossed their mind to dual-boot and they find it simple because they single-boot it on a very over-specced system where space restraints don't matter much.

[Flamingoat]

Similar thing with the disk layout happened to me in a VM. I just did auto layout and one of the partitions were so small I couldn't install any other software. I ended up remaking the VM and just using two partitions for the entire disk IIRC.

They have gotten used to stuff like this and think is normal.

Debian has similar issues with making partitions too small. It makes the /boot partition so small that if you have more than a couple kernel images, you run out space. If you use the LUKS crypt with LVM, the suggest layout would have vg-root too small.