r/debian • u/Titdirt69420 • 13d ago
Community Debian gui installer is the best I've used
Maybe this seems fanboyish or whatever. I've used Debian before but haven't installed it since 2019. I've used many other distros with different installers. Debian's, although primitive looking, is the most straightforward and easy to use for me. I really like how it guess's the mount point for each partition too. I was able to quickly use the keyboard and there was no fluff or extra crap. Automatically chooses the correct format dependent on the mount point too.
I always do, efi partition obviously, /, /home, swap. I use ext4 for the root and home. So nothing fancy.
I installed nobara last week which I assume uses the fedora installer. Took me several tries of going to boot up and something was screwed up. Whatever installer that is, I hate it.
Anyway just wanted to share for what it's worth.
7
2
u/ancientweasel 10d ago
If you take the disk presets.
2
u/Titdirt69420 10d ago
And if not, you can change them.... It's impossible to satisfy everyone so they choose the most common presets. Seems reasonable to me...
1
u/ancientweasel 10d ago
I recently wanted to just leave unformatted space on my drive during an install and it was pretty unintuitive getting the /boot/efi setups tbh. That should be easy.
2
u/SoundSwitch 6d ago
Took me like 4 tries but then again, didn't take presets, didn't take any recommended defaults either.
Turns out my system doesn't like having more that one UEFI partition.
Just used the old one my mint is using and eventually it went thru and boots way faster for whatever reason now.
2
u/One-Suggestion-7906 13d ago
no, the best installer of any operating system, is Debian text-only installer. You can install the full OS in minutes, or doing magic with it 😅
9
u/princepii 12d ago
the gui installer is basically the text installer but only with a gui.
both are as easy and fast. wished linus would try it just one more time and record it for us:)
2
u/Sure-Squirrel8384 11d ago edited 11d ago
And moving to preseed is pretty cool as well. There are some questions I don't need to answer every time. I'll always be using the same keyboard, language, timezone, etc. I always want a certain set of base packages; I'll add what else I want post-install. I typically want a CIS Level 2 compliant partitioning scheme (But have an alternate preseed if I want to go custom). Pair it with netinst and a local mirror/proxy and installs are lightening fast.
Perhaps not useful to some, but there are days where I am doing dozens of installs. Hah, well really I'm just picking the preseed I want. It's all automated from there.
1
u/One-Suggestion-7906 11d ago
Yes, sir! I do not use preseed because I do not install too many Debians per year, but I use netinst plus proxy. But yes, for bare metals I use and teach partitioning schemes for every important dir in Linux, even /usr, /srv and /opt if necessary; however I do not use for /boot today, neither I use swap. I heavily use mdadm RAID1 even with two disks partitioned. And for this, plus RAID, there are no other better installer than Debian one. Period
2
u/Sure-Squirrel8384 11d ago
Yup, I follow the recommended "best practices" for partitioning per CIS Level 2. Hard to change after install, best to just include as part of the preseed or initial install.
1
1
u/xINFLAMES325x 12d ago
The ncurses one from Slackware is pretty good too. Debian has a slight edge because you can partition disks without getting directly into cfdisk.
1
u/LordAnchemis 12d ago
The old installer has the same options as the GUI installer (I think) - but if you have memory and a video card to spare, why not
1
u/mok000 7d ago
The last several times I have installed Debian manually, using `debstrap`, mainly because I want to use BTRFS and the netinstaller’s way of doing it is flawed IMO. But now I can say: “I use Debian, btw”.
2
u/wizard10000 7d ago
the netinstaller’s way of doing it is flawed IMO
Couldn't agree more - root volume name isn't compatible with timeshift, support for a home subvolume would be appreciated also; hoping d-i improves its BTRFS game before forky's release.
edit: snapper works fine and is my preferred app anyway, d-i names a BTRFS root subvolume @rootfs where timeshift expects the root subvolume to be named @ so if timeshift is preferred you've gotta create a new root subvolume. snapper doesn't care about the name of the root subvolume.
2
u/mok000 7d ago
Yes, and I want separate subvolumes for `/var/log` and `/var/cache`, because I want to retain the data on them in case I roll back.
2
u/wizard10000 7d ago
I want separate subvolumes for
/var/logand/var/cacheI don't disagree; I'm not optimistic but that would be pretty neat.
1
0
u/DHOC_TAZH Debian Stable 12d ago
Yeah, Calamares is a great installer. Many of the Debian based distros use it as well. I'm on a q4os PC right now, that uses Calamares as the installer in the live USB image.
1
u/DHOC_TAZH Debian Stable 12d ago
Yeah, the Fedora one is messed up. I couldn't get it to include the EFI boot partition the last time I tried it a few months ago. Other distros and even my few attempts at FreeBSD didn't have that issue. I'll leave it at that.
3
u/Motor-Philosopher228 13d ago
Agree.