Well, I don’t think the GUI installer is doing any harm. People with wrong expectations would have at least tried NixOS, but without the GUI installer they may wouldn’t even try to install it.
(is it correct English? The use of tense here was quite complicated 
)
I guess the question is whether there is a benefit to not trying until one is competent to do it. And how it compares to people who can managed the system via a complicated config language but are used to GUI installers… (and, I guess, how much the manual flow should still be advertised — I think last time I have installed Fedora, I was actively searching for a way to do some steps manually, but keep the installer doing the equivalent of nixos-install with a minimal configuration)
Mostly fine. “may wouldn’t” isn’t quite right. You could:
Not quite, but better than my German, Arabic, etc.
Wdym, if your live usb boots uefi, it installs uefi automatically.
And if you don’t boot UEFI, as a motherboard with bad firmware might because an MBR is present, it will automatically install in MBR mode.
I don’t think the distro should be blamed for the terrible firmware that’s out there, but I suspect other distros have stopped supporting MBR in their install USBs. This might mean they behave a bit nicer out of the box for people who have no idea just how broken their motherboards are. Poorly thought out legacy support might also become more common as non-UEFI systems die out.
An alternative might be splitting the install CD into UEFI/MBR CDs? I’m not sure if this makes the situation better, though.
having a gui environment was useful for me for looking up resources about installing nixos when i first installed nixos.(i wasn’t used gui installer because it hadn’t had btrfs subvolume support)
i think having a gui environment is nice to have for installer.
but i feel like gui installer should walk trough changes you make in installer in sync with your generated config file so you can get an idea of how things work on nixos.
btw sorry for my bad english
I really am not opposed to the plasma and gnome ISOs, only to the halfheartedly GUI installer, that hides NixOS complexity until after the first reboot.
There really should be better feedback about what choices in the installer result in which change in the config and the user should be able to interfere with it at any step in the installer.
And of course, rather than being stuck in “you are offline” it should offer a guided Network setup.
This should be a sponsored project IMO. A (well) working installer is the first step if you want user adoption of your OS to a wider audience.
I wonder if the NixOS foundation is more looking for Nix adoption or NixOS.
I’m opposed to this, we need “runtime” tooling first that reliably helps the user to manage their system.
Managing the running system is a continous process, installing happens rarely.
It doesn’t help with adoption if installing is done in 3 clicks and a reboot, when after that you can’t even replace nano with emacs or neovim without reading a 200 pages theis and a thousand pages manual.
In the last year or so since the installer is available, I have seen a lot of users in the inofficial discord, who really dodn’t know how or where to continue, as the process simply didn’t tell them what to do with the /etc/nixos/configuration.nix. Those users quite often left after after a week or so. Before the GUI installer, most users had question already during the initial installation phase and when they actually managed to get through it, they often kept the system alive for quite longer than a week.
I still see similar rations when there are users that were unable to use the GUI installer because the graphical ISOs have been incompatible with their GPU (but after install they were able to select the correct driver).
About user friendliness, I prefer to “sponsor” SnowflakeOS 
İ think offical installer should show your to be generated config file side by side on every step and show how changes you make in installer effect your config file(like showing diff off before after)
İ think that kind of installer can let newbeis get feel of how nixos works
İ also think offical installers goal shouldnt be install as fast as possible but be kind of tutorial of nixos
I said something similar somewhere yesterday, and I thought its been in this thread, but it obviously wasn’t…
I keep on wondering why the great work on mynixos
hasn’t been put up front at the NixOS website.
mynixoshttpsttps://discourse.nixos.org/t/mynixos-flake-centric-website-for-nix-nixos-configs-v-0/17908
If you want to know about configurations you sureley need to take a look at that website imho.
Please DM me as i would love to see what you have documented. I personally love learning from other peoples fixes etc
well said, i totally agree
nope, you have to manually create your uefi partitions. even documented on their nixos website. tbh, thats rather poor. also, no option to choose different fs as it only defaults to ext4. It also removes any other grub / linux os probers. Fortunately, it ignores w11.
There should be a nixos-generators-style “pre-installer” that manages the pre-install things before calling nixos-install. It should be managed with a Nix config like so:
{
systems = {
foo = {
bootSystem = "EFI";
rootFilesystem = "btrfs";
configuration = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
modules = [
./foo/configuration.nix
];
};
};
};
}
The NixOS gui installer can be just made up of 3 steps:
nix-install and install NixOSAre there any Nix utilities similar to my pre-installer concept?
EDIT: Clarified things
Wait… Is it possible to install by generating a disk image with nixos-generators and writing that directly to the target disk?
There’s disko, which kind of does what you want: GitHub - nix-community/disko: Declarative disk partitioning and formatting using nix [maintainer=@Lassulus]
I don’t think this is quite GUI-point-and-click levels of easy though.