On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 12:50 AM, David C. Rankin <drankinatty@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Seriously, I like the Arch installer just fine, but I can tell you that the > Ubuntu/SuSE install rating most likely come from the fact that the gui > installers they employ are easy on the eye and they have put a lot of effort > into automating the difficult parts of the install procedure that most new > users don't understand --> the partitioning. Partitioning was scary for me precisely because many systems try to hide it from the user. The data that you have might be more valuable to you than your machine. The automated partitioning tool might or might not do the right thing. And if it screws up, you have no idea what went wrong and how to deal with it. A short anecdote. Several years ago, I decided to install Ubuntu (my first "real" distro, as opposed to a LiveCD) on my desktop. I had two drives: 500 GiB, where my Windows install and other files lived, and an old 80 GiB drive, for Ubuntu installation. During the install, Ubuntu overwrote MBR on the 500 GiB drive and installed Ubuntu and GRUB on the 80 GiB one. Long story short, all was fine until I decided to remove the 80 GiB drive with Ubuntu from my machine - without it, Windows wouldn't boot due to missing GRUB. And in order to make the machine bootable again, I had to spend a considerable amount of time reading about bootloaders, GRUB, MBRs, partitions and all that. My point is that I'm not at all convinced that automating the difficult parts is the way to go. It might be preferred by some, but I'm not sure that they know what they're missing (I didn't). You will have to know what you are doing sooner or later. I'm also not convinced that people who do not wish to read about partitioning should install OSs on their own, but hey, what do I know :)
