Desktop installer is outdated

Haug Bürger habu at posteo.de
Sun May 3 06:33:52 UTC 2020


Hi,

I just tested the latest 20.04 release in the hope that the installer
improved. It did not improve. The desktop installer really needs work.

It prefers plain text vs encryption which is not appropriate these days
and makes Ubuntu insecure. You have to choose extra options to get an
encrypted setup. If yo do so, it is not possible to create a setup which
uses multiple disks.
A different issue is the plain text /boot partition required. This is
also insecure and unnecessary. This partition reserves fixed space for
the Kernels, causing issues if to small or wasting space if to big. The
installer allows it to be any size and doesn't propose a size. Since
GRUB can boot LUKS devices this is unnecessary.
The third major issue the missing support for file systems supporting
snapshots.

Linux itself supports all of the mentioned short comings. It is possible
to create encrypted multi disk setups. It is also possible to boot
directly from the encrypted partition. It is possible to use for example
BTRFS as root file system, gaining compression and snapshots. It is
possible to have a swap file on a BTRFS partition. Everything is
available and the installer should be able to glue it together.

With ZFS on the doorstep it is time to renovate the installer to support
the new features of modern file systems and bring security i to up to date.

My question is. Who is in charge for the installer?

Regards
	Haug




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