Ubuntu installers?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 2023-01-11 at 00:07 +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> I think we'll end up with 2 sorts of distro:
> * the developer edition, with lots of controls and options...
> 
> ... which is used to build...

Hi,

to build you need a way that ensures that no customisation does cause
errors. What I use to build some, but not all of my Arch Linux packages
is
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/DeveloperWiki:Building_in_a_clean_chroot
.

> * the user edition, with no controls and no options, and you can only
> install from a curated selection of apps in a store... and most people
> won't care and will like it.

That does work more or less for iPadOS, since the hardware of the
available devices is known and by default it has got an underlying
allround software infrastructure. But even on iPadOS it often fails to
work.

It does not work for Linux that is aimed to run on countless hardware
combinations and is missing an underlying allround infrastructure.

There are attempts to establish the mentioned infrastructure for
consumer and producer multimedia, see https://pipewire.org/ . AFAIK it's
not really a solution yet. IIOW I've never tested it myself and never
heard that somebody mentioned that it does its job without issues yet.

However, the hardware issue remains, hence packages need to be available
build with different options, which means that users usually need to
rebuild packages or need to use third party repositories.

If you provide packages with different enabled or disabled options by a
store Jane Doe will be unable to chose the correct version.

Regards,
Ralf

PS: Since you wrote about FreeBSD. It's comparable to the non-user
friendly, but user-centric Arch Linux, with ports and packages. AFAIK
all end-user friendly FreeBSD "distros" were short-dated, they did not
exist for a very long time or tend to follow FreeBSD very slowly.