I agree. Having been a Linux user for almost two decades, having tried Linux from scratch already, I never really got into Arch or Gentoo as their installation experience back in the day was too far off the beaten path. But as I gained experience in software development, particularly with infrastructure is code, eventually learning of Nix through tech blogs and YouTubers: its novel declarative premise resonated with me, and the graphical installer lowered the friction for onboarding and adoption.
Indeed, this is definitely how I’ve been propagating my NixOS config onto rest of my systems thus far. I can also see how giving the user an opportunity just before clicking the final install button to alter the nix config directory prior to deployment would be advantageous for same experienced users as well.
A TUI is still a UI… it’s not inherently Superior for running out of a terminal window (it’s likely worse in many areas like accessibility). A UI-based installer will never capture all use-cases, but it better at least handle the standard use-cases extremely well. Is there a reason to use this project over calamares?
No idea if it’s better than Calamares, I have neither tested it nor reviewed the code behind it, but it is in active development, last commit was 5 days ago.
And yes likely it’s worse in terms of accessibility, I just brought it up as a different UI based installer, an alternative, may have done stuff better in some areas than Calamares, no?
Edit: Calamares last commit was 3 months old while the src was 4 months old, not outdated nor abandoned, but I wouldn’t call it in active development.
Brand new codebase has more recent commits than low-churn established codebase. News at 11?
(Also note the GUI installer was merged into nixpkgs a few days ago with some significant improvements, including the qt6 update. We will be archiving the old repo).
Last commit pushed to the default branch was just two weeks ago:
I’m guessing you looked at their GitHub repo, which is still hyper linked to by the project’s website.
I was also confused when I couldn’t find the release notes for the version delineated in the mentioned nixpkgs PR, until I noticed the src was fetching from a different url.
for running out of a terminal window (it’s likely worse in many areas like accessibility). A UI-based installer will never capture all use-cases, but it better at least handle the standard use-cases extremely well. Is there a reason to use this project over calamares?