OSNews

Browsing the OSNews forums, you can find many comparisons of the form "OS A has an excellent text installer, but OS B has a mediocre GUI installer, therefore OS B is better, simpler, and easier to use." Granted, I'm oversimplifying somewhat. And of course, in general they leave out the adjectives "excellent" and "mediocre," so the comparison reduces to "having a GUI installer means the OS is better and easier to install." But there's the rub! Without describing the quality of the installer, you're only seeing half the picture: the point should be the excellence of OS A's install process, not the fact that OS B's install is graphical! That quality and functionality are more important than icons and eye candy should be the title of the first chapter of every introductory text on software design, which leads us to our first myth.

Myth: A GUI install process implies a simple install
This is at best an oversimplification, and at worst completely wrong. Simplicity is multi-faceted, and it means more than merely having a GUI to guide the user through the process. If there is going to be a GUI, it had better be intuitive and well-designed. I would far rather have a well-documented, simple text install than a bad graphical install any day!

As an example, consider Tsu Dho Nimh's excellent article Migrating to Linux not easy for Windows users. Here's a guy who says right on page 1 in bold face "It must have a GUI interface for installing ... the system." I can respect that (to each his own, right?), but he certainly doesn't make the mistake of equating "pretty GUI" with quality, and his article has several good examples of bad graphical OS installers. To take just one example, he says of the "Linux for Windows" install (when trying to install a dual-boot system with Windows):

If you follow the installation steps as prompted, you end up with a full installation of Linux and a partitioned, formatted hard drive, just as if you had bought the standard version. You would lose your Windows system and all your data.

That doesn't sound particularly simple to me: an installer that doesn't do what the prompts say it's going to do? Let's contrast that with the OpenBSD installer, which is completely text-based. It fits on a single floppy disk! Surely this must count for a few simplicity points! Also, it is very well documented: my first install of OpenBSD, with the help of the excellent docs, took about half an hour, and I had no previous BSD experience! Granted, you end up with a very minimal install, but that's fine, because I personally like the idea of conceptually separating the installation of the system from the installation and configuration of programs. I find this very flexible, which brings us to myth #2.

Myth: A GUI installer implies a flexible install
Nothing debunks this myth better than one look at the Windows installer. The install guide for the Windows 9x/ME series could have fit on a single page: give in your license code, select your time zone, and watch the countdown for an hour. For all intents and purposes, the Windows installation process is a huge glorified hourglass icon! To this very day, when a sysadmin or a power user needs to do a more complex install of Windows 2000 or XP, what do you do? Admit it: you pop in the four diskettes and use the text installer! The mere fact that you have a graphical install process doesn't mean that process is flexible.

Compare this with FreeBSD's sysinstall. It is extremely powerful and flexible: you can configure X, set up network services, do user management, software installation, and tons more stuff. Not to mention the fact that (excluding the critical install-time tasks), you can do it all when you want to! At install time, later, it doesn't matter. So much flexibility from a text based installer ... who'd have thunk it?

Myth: All OSes/Distributions are vying for desktop supremacy
I apologize: to all the sysadmins and seasoned OS veterans, the fact that this statement is mere myth may seem completely self-evident, but the fact of the matter is that apparently many people don't realize this. The fact is that niche markets are just as common in the OS world as they are anywhere else, and it is not the case that the Holy Grail of all operating system development is the coveted desktop market. An operating system can be specially designed for real-time considerations, for security, or maybe it's just somebody's hobby. Let's take just two examples, though there are dozens more.

OpenBSD is very popular in security-sensitive settings, and its minimal install process is an excellent example of the principle of least privilege. Gentoo's flexible install appeals to the hacker, the power user, and anyone eager to learn about what's under the hood of a Linux system. Granted, there may be desktop potential in each of those niche markets, but their install processes are tailored to their respective target audiences.

Conclusion:
A comprehensive install process is a massive plus for any OS. After all, in operating systems, much like in ... ummm ... dandruff management, "You never get a second chance to make a first impression." (For the benefit of any foreign readers, that was the slogan of an anti-dandruff shampoo in Canada.) And if that install process is graphical, so much the better. A GUI enhances the user experience and is generally more newbie-friendly.

That being said, I'm seeing comments like "that OS has no future ... it doesn't even have a graphical install!" far too often. I think such comments often result from the myths we've discussed here, and also from people forgetting two important points.

Firstly, installation is supposed to be a one-time thing (for the user, not the hacker/power-user/sysadmin): surely the quality of the system you end up with at the end should be more important than what you're looking at during the one-time install process! Have we gotten so caught up in eye candy that we can't stand to look at a text console for an hour?

Finally, it should be the quality that counts. In the spirit of using the best tool for the job, I'll always choose a good, well-documented text install process over a "GUI-for-the-sake-of-GUI" install.

About the Author:
Paul Hankes Drielsma currently works as a researcher in the area of information security at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He previously worked as a system administrator and has been an OS hobbyist for several years. He can be reached at drielsma@yahoo.com.