Skip to content

why

Jump to bottom
XADE edited this page Mar 2, 2024 · 8 revisions

Why Does This Exist?

Why not?

Motivation

In the year 2020,

the distro hopping saga began

a continuous switch between distributions in pursuit of the perfect system (yeah, stupid right ?).

This process was quite cumbersome,

  • Steps were repetitive
  • And mostly ISOs didn't support my wireless card (moral of the story: never get a Broadcom card).

Here are my opinions:

  • Knowledge of installing a system isn't necessarily needed for using it (one can learn better with a working system).
    • Maintaining the distro post-installation provides more valuable knowledge.
  • To learn how to build a bootable system from scratch (the usefulness of which is uncertain), consider going directly for LFS. Bootstrapping distributions with a package manager barely teaches anything beyond using that package manager itself.

So, I decided to create this.

At that time, I was very new to Linux, making distro hopping easier for me.

  • Now, I could use any GNU/Linux live image or already installed distribution to install any other distribution. This was particularly useful since my Broadcom wireless card only worked with a few live images, like Antix.

I aimed for simplicity so that users can easily understand how it works. Flexibility came along the way.

This might be wrong, but I believe awk is the only complex part of the script.

Some limitations were set:

  • Only || (OR operator) can be used for conditions, any other method of testing conditions (if / else / case / [] ...) must be avoided.
  • Don't know why I haven't used loops, but will maintain the current approach for the time being.
  • Use only a limited number of commands and keep the dependencies low, sticking to the absolute necessities.

This approach helped improve my thinking skills (or maybe not).

There were situations where I considered breaking those limits, but I always found a way around.

Limitations

However, I've only stuck with two distributions for more than a day:

  1. Artix: my first Linux distribution, and dinit suited me the best among many init systems I tried.
  2. NixOS

You can get a glimpse of my setup here.

Conclusion

I've learned a lot during this journey, and I'm still learning.

Congrats, you have successfully wasted your time.

Regards,

XADE

Features

Requirements

Notes

Walk Through :

  1. Execute the script

  1. Select Distro & Packages

Click one of the Distros below for Detailed steps

Distro non Systemd Immutable musl support compilation support
Arch
Artix ✔
Alpine ✔ ✔
Void ✔ ✔ ✔
Gentoo ✔ ✔ ✔
Funtoo ✔ ✔ ✔
NixOS ✔ ✔ ✔
GUIX ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔

  1. Select Volume/Partition

Questions :

How ?

Why ?

Clone this wiki locally