They used to have a decent menu-driven installer. Why they threw it out and said, "here's zsh and a wiki page, go install," is beyond me (not to mention the default environment of your installed system is pretty different from the environment on the live disc). Even OpenBSD is easier to get up and running.
That said, I still contend that pacman is hands-down the best package manager in existence. I just prefer to use it on Frugalware nowadays.
Honestly, having used both the old installer and the new procedure dozens of times each, I really do prefer the wiki page. It's just a lot more flexible and comfortable to a shell user. It also exposes a number of config files that as an arch user, you should be aware of. In that way, I find it to conform to the "Arch Way[1]" than the system it replaced.
Not to say that it doesn't have it's downsides, like scaring off new users.
I think it would be fine if they gave a little guidance on the disc itself. Maybe little notes above the prompt that tell you what you should do next in the installation process, or even just a notice that says "see /usr/doc/INSTALL for instructions". The first time I attempted to install Arch after the installer was dropped, I had no idea what to do and had to find another computer to bring the wiki up. Some people might not have a spare computer to bring the instructions up, and they might not have a printer either.
If you 'ls' in the first directory you are dropped into you will see INSTALL.txt. You can use cat, less. more, vim or nano to read the document. You can use ALT+f2 to switch to a second pty and install away.
Good to know! I still hold that it would be helpful if there was some indication that the file was there. Neither the Installation Guide nor the download page mention it at all.
Feels like the developers said, "hi, we're starting to get too many of those pesky users, let's make each of them run a bunch of obscure commands just to get started".
Well, I'm not being fair here, the commands are not really obscure (except the ones they made up), and I'm sure they had a reason. But I just recently had to reinstall Arch after many years, and found the new "installer" strange and kind of daunting compared to the old one.
Yea I'm not sure why they got rid of the menu-driven installer and zsh sucks imo. I can still live with the installation process though, it boils down to: partitioning your disk, setup filesystems, /mnt and /mnt/boot (for my desktop), use pacstrap for base system, install bootloader. After one installation with the manual process you can still install Arch in 30 minutes, plus you can thank it for somewhat forcing you to understand how you are setting up your system.
Pacman is really the best. I had to be reminded of that recently when I had the luxury of dealing with a Ubuntu system. Granted I don't have to deal with that system everyday but having to use apt, aptitude, dpkg to accomplish different things? What a fucking mess.
I've been living my life mostly using pacman with archlinux and in the last year I experienced the ubuntu/debian way for the first time... Trying to get around dozen of apt commands and other tools is truly painfull.
But it's probably just me that got used to a simple and easy life with pacman...
There was a time that I even had to create an ubuntu package, well, don't get me started, I cried a little and lost around 3 days.
Last time I installed arch was before they removed the menu driven installer and it sure had some problems and bugs, so even if I have not tried it yet, I think I prefer this way of installing. It's cleaner, simpler, so better.
apt vs. pacman: Could you elaborate a little? What's your main reasoning for this?
I have tried Arch on three machines (old netbook, laptop, desktop) and all went fine during installing (all LUKS cryptorooted). What made me mad was when some stuff broke on two of them due to infrequent updates this spring (didnt use both netbook+desktop for a longer time). Alas, I can't remember details any more.
Made me switch back (to debian)
I almost never use aptitude and dpkg only for low level stuff (e.g, when there are errors). Apt alone is in almost all cases sufficient.
That said, I still contend that pacman is hands-down the best package manager in existence. I just prefer to use it on Frugalware nowadays.