Install ready-made distribution images!
It is created as a replacement to Red Hat's Anaconda installer for Ultramarine Linux and tauOS after we have heard many complaints about the poor UX design of Anaconda, and the lack of working alternative installers for RPM-based distributions.
Right now this is a work in progress, and Readymade will simply be a frontend for systemd-repart.
Work on a dedicated backend for Readymade is planned.
As we have mentioned previously, the reasons were:
- Anaconda is badly designed, bulky and has a very poor UX for both unattended installs (using Kickstart) and normal user installs. It is written in Python in an aging codebase, ported from Python 2 to 3, and has lots of legacy code from the 90s since the inception of the original Red Hat Linux. It also relies on the aging DNF 3 library which will be replaced by DNF 5 in the near future.
- YaST is designed for SUSE and SUSE only, it also suffers from the same issues as Anaconda, with an extremely large and complex codebase for simply being a wrapper for various system utilities.
- Calamares' support for Fedora is very hacky, as it is simply a barebones installer framework. It also has issues with BTRFS installs and does not support our desired features such as homed.
Please refer to HACKING.md for more information on how to contribute to Readymade.
As the convention of making up codenames for system components after J-Pop references, we have decided to name the installer after Ado's single, Readymade, which happens to have a cool meaning to it as this installer essentially installs ready-made squashfs images.
The lyrics themselves could be seen as an insult to people overcomplicating things for themselves (e.g. Arch installation).
Readymade is generally licensed under the MIT License, but some parts of the codebase and assets may be licensed differently. The non-MIT licensed parts will be clearly marked in the source code and in the assets.