Consider using LMDE installer for Linux Mint Main Edition

[dg1727]

I have recently installed LMDE, then attempted to install (onto a different partition on the same PC) the main edition of Linux Mint. I found the main-edition installer to have several usability problems, and I don't remember the LMDE installer being that bad. So maybe the LMDE installer should be used for the main edition in the future.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, I'll list what I happen to remember:

• The partition setup screen had several issues:
  • The graphic can omit some partitions if they are very small; this happened to the 0.1GB EFI system partition. This was disorienting to me, since I'd spent a lot of effort putting that partition there, so in my mind it wasn't zero pixels wide. :-) As a result of this partition being omitted, the color coding (of the graphic vs. the legend below it) didn't seem to match up until I realized what the problem was.
  • The graphic also doesn't show the partitions' % space used, which could help a user very much in identifying the partitions, since in normal PC usage (and also in Windows) the partitions typically aren't referred to with Linux device names like "/dev/sda2".
  • An existing bootable Ubuntu "/" partition wasn't detected as having an OS on it. This could easily allow the user to install Linux Mint onto that partition by mistake.
  • In the popup window for editing a partition, the default is to ask the user to select a format type (btrfs, ext4fs, etc.) - implying that the partition will be reformatted - even when (maybe because the partition contains valuable data) the user hasn't ticked the checkbox to reformat the partition.
  • The GUI should make it more obvious that the most common mount points to specify are / and /home. For example, the mount-point combobox currently defaults to blank, letting the user type a text string, but I'd prefer if this control were a listbox which defaulted to one of the standard values ("/", "/home", etc.) and had an option for "Other" which opened a text-entry field.
  • At the lower left of the partition screen, there is a button called "Change" which is mandatory for the user to click in order to set up the partitions correctly. This button-label sounds too drastic. All I wanted to do was to decompress Linux Mint from the USB stick to an existing, blank, Linux-formatted partition, not to "change" anything else on the hard drive.
• Erasing the whole hard drive is the default? I suspect that:
  • Almost all Linux Mint installs are either (a) "distro-hopping" or (b) a dual-boot with Windows. Even the usual same-distro upgrade (from, say, Linux Mint 17 to Linux Mint 18 when LM17's support is about to expire) is just a special case of "distro-hopping." In neither (a) nor (b) should the whole hard drive be erased.
  • Therefore, it probably takes more admin experience to know that it is safe to erase the whole hard drive than to want to preserve existing data on that drive.
  • OEMs, who seem to be the most likely market segment to erase the whole hard drive, may do the install in a more automated way (e.g., UEFI allows netboot) and not use this GUI.

Some of these issues may sound unimportant, but the installer is one of the most important components that has to make sophisticated admin tasks be straightforward for inexperienced users. I could write a few more sentences about this, but hopefully I don't have to.

If you want a more definitive list of the problems, I can try the main-edition install again & take notes. However, I offered the suggestion the way I did because I hope this way would be less work than fixing the problems with the existing main-edition installer.

The fact that a separate installer exists for LMDE may indicate that the development team has already been aware of the above issues.

The current releases of Linux Mint are LMDE 2 "Betsy" (2017 update) and Linux Mint (Main Edition) 18.1 Serena.

[dg1727]

Another problem with the current Linux Mint (main edition) installer is that it seems to allow installation of only whichever boot method (legacy-BIOS vs. UEFI) pertains to the "live" USB stick or DVD rather than the hard drive that's being installed to. See items 2 & 3 in https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=237&t=240383&p=1284047#p1284047

[dg1727]

When I opened this issue, I wrote:

An existing bootable Ubuntu "/" partition wasn't detected as having an OS on it.

I think this was because that partition was Btrfs and had the root in a subvolume (the name of the subvolume was "@").

Also, on the same PC, the Serena install now has its root in subvolume "@" of its partition. I didn't specify this during install. Either (A) the partition was formatted with that subvolume by the PC vendor and I didn't bother to reformat the partition when running the Linux Mint installer, or (B) the Linux Mint installer put that subvolume there (I'm guessing it was case A). It appears that the Serena installer correctly handles its own "/" and "/home" being in Btrfs subvolumes. Notably, /etc/fstab in Serena has the subvol=@ and subvol=@home mount options for the 2 respective partitions. (/home on the PC in question is in subvolume @home of a separate partition, which was set up that way when the "existing bootable Ubuntu '/' partition" was installed.)

The expected behavior is that the installer detects existing OSes if they are in a Btrfs subvolume such as "@".