Installer issues

Development
1

iso used: nixos-plasma6-24.05.2411.706eef542dec-x86_64-linux.iso

most importantly: the installer FAILS with the following error message: “swapon failed to activate the device /dev/vda3
Details:
failed while activating:/dev/mapper//dev/vda3”

I chose the options: plasma desktop and swap with hibernate

the second issue i have with the installer is that when i tried installing on my laptop, the first thing the installer did was tell me that there was no internet connection and block until this is resolved. fair enough, however, the problem is, that the keyboard layout is US and thus it is hard for me to enter the wifi password. going to keyboard settings in plasma does not give you the option to set the layout; im sure it is possible to set it somehow, but i do not know plasma well and this is not a plesant experience. please somehow immediately prompt the user to choose his layout instead of having him look for the setting himself, or do it like other linux installers and set the current layout when you set the intended layout in the installer and only afterwards ensure that there is an internet connection.

2

I always do my partitioning manually or I use disko. So I don’t know what the installer is doing there. It looks odd, it can’t activate the swap partition it seems.

On the keyboard issue:

im sure it is possible to set it somehow, but i do not know plasma well and this is not a plesant experience

That is most likely true, but Plasma documentation might actually help here more than NixOS forums. It appears Plasma has a layouts tab for keyboards?

https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/plasma-desktop/kcontrol/keyboard/layouts.html

please somehow immediately prompt the user to choose his layout instead of having him look for the setting himself

Maybe it is good to remind oneself that up until fairly recently, there was no graphical installer for NixOS at all. :sweat_smile:

Generally speaking and not trying to be rude here, looking for settings yourself is something you will do a lot … and in particular on distros like NixOS or Arch Linux or Gentoo, that heavily depend on the user’s ability to debug things if they go wrong.