I can't resist jumping in. I see what y'all are saying but have you considered the possibility of multiple installers? The standard officially supported and maintained one that's guaranteed to work. Others, clearly labelled as contributed works, buried in sysutils and maybe on github that have colors and fonts and themes and music. Video for all I care.
I don't know or care what softdep is and if you're going to impose full-disk encryption I'll find a different operating system. KISS, too much to go wrong. Back about 2008 I had my own way of downloading and installing, still with the stock installer. I'd download some files and put them on a CD, using the install floppy image as a boot image. Boot the CD as a floppy, shell out and mount it as a CD, then go back and install from a mounted drive. Worked fine for years until somebody had a "bright idea" that broke it. I don't mind reading man pages but re-reading them to see if they've changed gets tedious. And you can rarely change something without breaking something else. I've been stuck in Linux-land lately because there's no BSD for my phones. Mostly it leaves a bad taste in my mouth but I can't help noticing how dpkg and apt-get and Synaptic (Debian) are different ways of doing the same things and they don't conflict with each other. There are a few variations of fdisk plus parted and gparted, fixparts and testdisk. There are several ways of installing, GUI and not, then there's debootstrap. Still dealing with that, installing a minimal ARM system from an i386 machine. But it'll fit in my pocket and I've done it before. Over time the tools broke because somebody changed something. -- Credit is the root of all evil. - AB1JX
