dotfiles VS archinstall

> And I don't mean a lack of documentation — what I mean is that the obvious decisions that have been taken (naming everything "Nix", using Haskell as a base for the syntax, ...)

I agree that the name is bad and has always been bad. I wonder what they were thinking. But the syntax of the Nix language is not based on Haskell. It would be better if it were, but the Nix syntax is actually based on trying to twist a functional language into looking like a Unix-style configuration file. It's horrible, and conceptually big details like "this is a function" is hidden in very subtle syntax (a single colon). The liberal use of semicolons and the use of space-separated lists is another concession to looking like a config file. I feel Nix would have been better if it didn't try to cater to older conventions in this way. Sometimes the old ways are just bad. Incidentally, one of the big advantages of Guix (a Nix fork/derivative) is that it uses Scheme as its declaration/configuration language.

I switched to Nix some years ago on my desktop system. While I was initially quite frustrated at lots of the paper cuts - particularly the byzantine design of Nixpkgs itself which is built around manual programming with fixed-point combinators - I was carried through by two things:

1) I was intellectually convinced that the basic premise was sound.

2) Getting a basic desktop system running doesn't require you to understand all the complexity. NixOS works really well out of the box with its standard settings, and making basic configuration changes and adding/removing packages doesn't require you to know anything about the Nix language or the design of Nixpkgs.

Not much later I was able to do pretty radical things like changing the version of LLVM used by Mesa on my system, to work around a defect in AMDs GPU drivers[0]. I have no idea how I would do something like that on Debian. Even better, when this workaround later became unnecessary, I just removed the pertinent parts from my configuration file, and it was like it was never there. My system is fully declarative and not soiled by the remnants of previous hacks.

[0]: https://github.com/athas/dotfiles/blob/d495aeb85fe38569eb212...

In any case, have you studied https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall and https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall. While archinstall is new and has the expected bugs, I've not had your issues before. You might try an earlier ISO, like Oct 2023, though it's not clear if you're using an ISO or the archinstall installed package.

I'm using my laptop as dual boot between Manjaro and Windows 10, I tried for months to install ArchLinux using archinstall tool but the operation always fails with random errors, because I want to install it on a single ext4 partition like how Manjaro is installed. Is there any trusted GUI installer that uses calamares and can install pure ArchLinux ?

The related issue https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/issues/1111 implies it's fixed, but either way, you can just securely delete your password after the install.

Mount that partition as /efi. Change this in your /etc/fstab as well. This is a good time to remove all the weird carriage returns that archinstall puts in your fstab file (https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/issues/1399).

Most distros have a nice graphical installer which does make things less of a hassle. But these days Arch also bundles archinstall which is quite easy to use and supports a few display environments for automatic setup right out the gate which is nice.

Or just use archinstall which is official part of the iso file.

You can post an issue at: https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall to get the attention of the developer. He's represented here but I forget his user id.

If you're still suffering with this problem: Maybe try to find the file/module on your system. If it's present, you might want to try to run this pacman -Sy python archinstall (found it here: https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/issues/1810) to reinstall python and the archinstall script. I hope that this helps you.

Still feels that it is in rapid development phase, rather than just maintenance, last month I encountered this bug