I assume you were obliquely referring to my comment, ralph.ronnquist, so I removed what is probably the part you found most objectionable.

But I have spent a great deal of my life trying to be polite and diplomatic, and I'm now at the age where I think a lot of the world's problems are caused by stupid people not being properly told they're being stupid. To that end, I've grown very fond of Linus Torvalds' occasional rants about "brain damage" in software, because that's what it is, and it needs to be called out. Politeness implies acceptance or at least tolerance, and stupid decisions should be greeted with neither.

Stupid decisions are stupid.

It's like a toddler without object permanence. "If I can't see it, it doesn't exist." How about you just do what I say and enable them?

1. Don't like the debian installer at all

Neither do it. What I very much dislike about the Debian installer is that it does a bit and then stops to wait for more input, does a bit and then stops to wait for more input, does a bit and then stops to wait for more input, and so on. And that means that I have to babysit the thing instead of answering a bunch of questions at the beginning, clicking OK, and then walking away to do something else. It wastes my time. There are other things I dislike about it, but that is the main one.

You might look at the Help in the installer or the readme in /usr/share/doc/refractainstaller-base. You only need to read four short lines to get to the answer.

STARTING REFRACTA INSTALLER  (9.5.x)

*** NEW in 9.4 ***

- UEFI and BIOS installers have been merged (both gui and cli scripts)

- Installer supports gpt disk with bios boot. (special partition needed)

- Installer supports full-disk encryption (no separate /boot partition)

Note: If you want to get into playing with chroot and doing some manual tasks, you can use the cli installer to do lvm or raid installs, which aren't overtly supported in refractainstaller.

Note2: If you want to tell me that it's not proper to have /boot inside the root partition, you'll need to explain why.  The reason for having it outside the encrypted partition all these years was so the bootloader could find the kernel. Well, now grub can find it in an encrypted partition.

1. Don't like the debian installer at all
2. Sick of hearing people bash RefractaInstaller, it's simply the best and fastest way to do an install.

That's just it, I do installs constantly, I have to do so for testing purposes on the iso's I make. It's no exaggeration to say i've done easily 300 or better in the last year, so perhaps that will give some context to my position. Think about the time needed to do a debian install vs. the 10 minutes it takes with RI, then times that by 300 and that's how many extra hours of my life i've saved by using it.

Time is precious. I only have so much to spare.

Starting to be amazed here at all the supposedly tech-savvy people who seem to need an installer app to hold their hands through the process.

Last time I ran the Devuan installer it was on ASCII. I'm on Excaliber now, dist-upgrade works just fine for me. Not sure how being able to run a CLI or a GUI for an install makes you any more or less tech-savvy. I've had only Linux on my machine since '98, and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.

I'm shocked about how much people care about the installer, as long as it works you should just get on with using your system. Unless of course you're an admin, have to manage many machines, or just like doing installs all the time.

My 18 year old just switched to Linux last year, and he decided he wanted to install Arch because he would "learn more about how Linux works". Good for him - but I guarantee you he doesn't know much more than before he installed it. He hasn't broken it yet, so he has some learning opportunities ahead of him.

FYI, refractainstaller had FDE before debian-installer did.

I suppose the keyword is "had" no "has". Now the only way to get FDE with refracta-installer is to chroot and to repair. Yes, it HAD, I've used it those times, but it's over.

I did a bios install with grub-efi-amd64 installed and I rebooted to a grub rescue prompt

Maybe grub-pc-bin was absent? It doesn't conflict.

Looking at the files that grub-efi-amd64 provides, I have no idea what it does. Looks like nothing. The script gathers information for a bug report.

$ apt-file list grub-efi-amd64
grub-efi-amd64: /usr/share/bug/grub-efi-amd64/presubj
grub-efi-amd64: /usr/share/bug/grub-efi-amd64/script
grub-efi-amd64: /usr/share/doc/grub-efi-amd64

I'm confused about is grub. I changed one line in the bootloader module so that it would boot efi or bios, and I'm wondering how it does that. Is a network connection required for that to succeed? My iso has grub-efi-amd64 installed, but I did a bios install and it got grub-pc from somewhere. (either network or it found the deb package that I put in the root of the squashed filesystem)

Am I missing something, or are not all the required grub files in the grub2-common and grub*-bin packages (which can all co-exist on efi or bios systems)?

The currently-running laptop here is bios only.. grub-efi is a dummy, grub-pc is absent and I don't see why grub-efi-amd64 is of any use:

$ dpkg -l|grep grub
ii  grub-common                            2.06-13+deb12u1                         amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader (common files)
ii  grub-efi                               2.06-13+deb12u1                         amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (dummy package)
ii  grub-efi-amd64                         2.06-13+deb12u1                         amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (EFI-AMD64 version)
ii  grub-efi-amd64-bin                     2.06-13+deb12u1                         amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (EFI-AMD64 modules)
ii  grub-efi-ia32-bin                      2.06-13+deb12u1                         amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (EFI-IA32 modules)
ii  grub-pc-bin                            2.06-13+deb12u1                         amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader, version 2 (PC/BIOS modules)
ii  grub2-common                           2.06-13+deb12u1                         amd64        GRand Unified Bootloader (common files for version 2)
  

$ dpkg -S /usr/sbin/grub-install
grub2-common: /usr/sbin/grub-install

$ dpkg -S /usr/sbin/update-grub
grub2-common: /usr/sbin/update-grub

In my last build, I copied all of the user's home to /etc/skel and uncommented the appropriate line in the modules. It worked - it kept all the user configs and changed the user name.

And no, I didn't run the scripts. I'll have to try a no-network install to see what happens.

I set it up to use the username and password of the machine taking the snapshot. So for example I can setup a system the way I want with a username live password live (it uses place_holder for whatever anyone wants to use), install the required packages for refracta and calamares, then from refracta-calamares-setup run scripts/install-config.sh, then run scripts/build-iso.sh and it's all done.

Calamares removes itself once it's finished the installation from the live usb. I also configured calamares to keep home/$USER/.config and home/$USER/.local, this can be added to or removed.

Anyone can change the logo, images for slideshow, number of images used, name of the installer or iso etc. And again CHAT BOTS have been used to write the scripts.

Refracta snapshot made this really easy so thanks again.

refracta-installer is half-garbage.

Oh bullshit.

Starting to be amazed here at all the supposedly tech-savvy people who seem to need an installer app to hold their hands through the process.