archlinux-installer-script VS stage0

I haven't installed it since ~2016/2017, so my knowledge might be outdated. If you use one of the arch-based distros with a GUI, then you're right that it's very easy to install.

If you follow the Wiki though, I think you still learn quite a bit: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide

This is right at the bottom of the installation guide (if you followed it and did not go the install script route). Regardless, it seems that arch is installed, now, either install a desktop environment (Gnome, KDE, XFCE, ... ) or a window manager ( i3, awesome, bspwm, herbstluftwm, ...) -> https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations#Graphical_user_interface.

I'm reading the installation guide. And I'm stick at section 1.2.

I started here https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide

Stop following outdated YouTube tutorials and just use the installation guide on the Arch Wiki. All of the information needed is there.

Just try to install arch once. It has excellent installation guide. But it all depends on what you want to achieve. If you are a complete newbie in linux I'd recommend going with something pre-configured first (I used manjaro before jumping too arch). But if you want to get better knowledge of system internals - try arch.

Somewhat tangential, but I'm curious how big the bootstrap seed for Nix is. That is, if you wanted to build the entire world, what's a minimum set of binaries you'd need?

Guix has put quite a bit of work into this, AFAIU, and it's getting close to being bootstrappable all the way from stage0 [0]. Curious if some group is also working on similar things for Nix.

[0]:https://github.com/oriansj/stage0

https://www.bootstrappable.org/ has some good info. Reading the source of https://github.com/oriansj/stage0 is also very enlightening. It's set its goal to be understandable by 70% of programmers.

Even if they aren't, people absolutely should be able to bootstrap new platforms from scratch. It's important to have confidence in our tools, in our ability to rebuild from scratch, and to be safe against the "trusting trust" attack among other things.

Lately I've been catching up on the state of the art in bootstrapping. Check out the live-bootstrap project. stage0 starts with a seed "compiler" of a couple hundred bytes that basically turns hex codes into bytes while stripping comments. A series of such text files per architecture work their way up to a full macro assembler, which is then used to write a mostly architecture-independent minimal C compiler, which then builds a larger compiler written in this subset of C. This then bootstraps a Scheme in which a full C compiler (mescc) is written, which then builds TinyCC, which then builds GCC 4, which works its way up to modern GCC for C++... It's a fascinating read:

https://github.com/oriansj/stage0

https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part...

Even if no one is "using" this it should still be a primary motivator for keeping C simple.

One countermeasure not mentioned here is bootstrapping a compiler with a program small enough to be manually verified. The stage0 project is under 1KB (small enough that the binary can be, and has been, manually checked against the hand written assembly), and GNU Guix (a system for reproducible, isolated builds) is currently working on moving it's bootstrap speed to stage0. That means that, fairly soon, there will be a large set of software that doesn't have a connection to an original C compiler.