I think the historical opposition of Arch devs to an installer is more maintenance. Most advanced users end up scripting their own specific system or getting a muscle memory for installing it (and that’s if they install Arch frequently at all).

Most if not all Arch devs are likely advanced users, they didn’t need to maintain a user friendly installer for themselves so the old one got out of date and was removed.

What’s probably changed recently is that Arch has grown enough to get devs/trusted users who actually wanted to write and maintain an installer, so now it has one.

I find the Arch dev justification/perspective for most things much better than many users on the forums who tend to pick up the basic idea and cargo cult it whilst losing the context behind it.

I'd call it more likely a form a neurosis than a cop-out.

It can be hard to resist some analysis paralysis when faced with an incredibly broad problem. There's a strong urge to find one solution to cover all cases. Trying to do everything at once being so overwhelming that it's impossible to get even started on it.

Of course, you're correct that the best thing to carve out the most common cases and then iterate. I've found that it takes time and experience to gain the wisdom to learn the perfect is the enemy of the good.

arch used to have an installer. it didn't work for everyone, and caused a lot of complaining. turned out most people could do the steps themselves.

it has an installer again. maybe the userbase will change.

Being that Arch is maintained with arch users in mind[0], building an installer for that user base would have to entail a wide range of option for unique use cases because that's whats expected of their users[1]. There isn't a "cop-out" or "plea" to users outside of the community because it was never a goal to appease them.

[0]https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux#User_centrality

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux#Versatility

No, it wouldn't, because that versatility can be attained by... not using the installer, the exact same as the situation without an installer.

An installer, if anything, improves "user centrality" because you're making it more accessible and usable to most users with just the most common few options.

Not having an installer improves "dev centrality" (the few users who matter are the devs and other advanced users), over and against user centrality.

You could use the same thinking to argue against having a package manager. You might have to install a package manually anyway, so why bother providing packages at all?

At the end of the day, as others have probably already said in this thread, the maintainers are unpaid volunteers and choose to focus on certain things for their own reasons and using their finite resources.

There are other distributions that focus on other things and people can choose. If Arch chose to implement lots of convenience functions, that choice could be to the detriment of other strong aspects of the distribution.

…which they chose to use to write an installer for Arch after all, so I find your arguments against it somewhat amusing.

I am aware of the fact that they wrote an installer. I do not think this invalidates my previous comment though.