It doesn`t give you choices. It leaves you in the dark about that it
is somehow
possible to use an non-gui installer and to do a minimal install. It leaves you
in the dark about what exactly happens when you do the partitioning and
with trying to figure out how get the partitioning you want.
As I said before, the entire installer was rebuilt to promote a more laid back approach.
The user can choose the order they wish to customize / experience the GUI installation
instead of being forced down a specific path. There might be a couple mandatories, but for
the most part it's all about choice.
A non-gui installation is not something that the majority of users will choose so it's
not apparent, but if you want that method, here you go:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/ch-...
Partitioning took me about three hours with the installer of F19,
with a very
simple setup and not even data to preserve and neither RAID, nor
encryption, and it was only possible after I created the partitions outside the
installer. There was no way to do it with the installer, it kept saying there
isn`t enough room despite there was plenty, and it did what it wanted rather
than what I wanted.
It was seriously awful. It would have taken 10--15 minutes with the Debian
installer.
I definitely think the usability of the partitioning scheme in the current installer needs
work, but as I stated earlier, I think some people are just griping about the change
instead of there actually being an issue; although, it does sounds like you actually had
an issue with it not detecting the correct size / free space of your drives. You might
want to submit a defect, because in comparison, I have a multi-drive setup with LUKs
encryption and I can have both drives wiped and start all over with encryption in less
than a minute or if I want to retain one disk scheme but clobber the other it takes about
3 minutes.
> A large majority of the information from the older installer is
still
> there, it's just up to the user to seek it out.
I don`t know anything about "the older installer" or how to seek out
information about it; I didn`t even know that there is an "older installer".
The
first Fedora installer I used was the one with F17.
F17 had the 'old' installer. The 'new' installer was introduced in F18.
> In essence the installer went from a hardcore presentational
format to
> a more laid back format - a shift every OS has consciously made in the
> last decade.
I don`t know what you mean. The Debian installer got more options and
some more clarity which was an improvement. Otherwise it didn`t change,
you just do country and keyboard setup --- which is missing in Fedoras
installer, there was no way to tell it that I have a German keyboard ---
network setup if you don`t use DHCP, partitioning, a bit of package selection
if you want to, and then it installs.
Keyboard configuration is not missing... it's one of the main hub options:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/ins...
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/sn-...
It`s easy and straightforward as it used to be for the last twenty
years, and I
never had trouble using it. Why suddenly make installing such a PITA like
Fedoras installer does?
The computer industry knows that more and more people want installations to be less scary
and faster. This trend has been seen in the evolution of the Windows installer, MacOS,
most Linux distros, and even iOS or Android. There are going to be some Linux distros that
don't embrace this, you mentioned Debian and I'm sure slackware and Arch won't
either, but in the end it's all about attracting more users to the product. The
choices are there, but us hardcore users just have to look more since we're the
minority.