Hide DE / WM in the Packages step

[5long]

On wiki page https://wiki.cachyos.org/installation/installation_on_root/ there's this warning:

Installing multiple desktop environments is not allowed during the installation process.

Choosing multiple DEs will, indeed, make the installer fail because most of them provide & conflict with the cachyos-desktop-settings virtual package.

We can prevent this. Just hide them. There's no need to present all the DEs as non-exclusive checkboxes in the Package UI. If users change their minds before the final big "Install" step, they can just click the Back button to choose a different DE. Or, they can install a different DE / WM post install.

[vnepogodin]

We would rather want to fix message box which should be repopulated when user:

1. select desktop and click next
2. click back and select different one

it's working correctly when it's just next, next

[vnepogodin]

https://github.com/CachyOS/cachyos-calamares/blob/cachyos-limine-qt6-dev/src/modules/netinstall/PackageModel.cpp#L223-L255

[5long]

Showing a list of DEs as non-exclusive checkboxes and show an error message box when user pick multiple DEs is like, for a lack of a better metaphor: leaving an unintentional trap and trying to save users who walk into them. I really think it'd better to remove the trap in the first place.

Besides, this patch is less code to maintain since hidden: true is implemented by upstream Calamares. We can just remove the current buggy code and stop worrying about it. I can do that as a fixup commit if you like.

[vnepogodin]

I think it's better to offer choice to the user. It's possible to install multiple without the settings package

[ptr1337]

FYI, we have quite a bunch of users "unbloating" the installation with packages they do not like, which would break here.

[5long]

I think it's better to offer choice to the user. It's possible to install multiple without the settings package

What kind of user are we talking about?

If we are talking about experienced users. They can install the packages they want post-install (ideally with a meta package to make it easier). This is still available to them even with this patch merged.

However, recently CachyOS is attracting lots of new Linux users and this patch is made for them. If we want to leave the choice to them, they better be well-informed to make such a choice before getting an error message. It's gonna be fairly difficult to deliver the necessary knowledge to them in a timely and digestible manner in the installer, let alone wishing they will actually read and understand all the text.

The current situation is: They will have to wait for 10 ~ 60 minutes (depending on their Internet speed) before getting stuck on a pacman error with no clear solutions.

Ultimately it's not my decision. But I really hope that we can make things easier (or less tedious) for newcomers with usability in mind.

FYI, we have quite a bunch of users "unbloating" the installation with packages they do not like, which would break here.

Thanks for the insight. I'm not familiar with Calamares yet to know if there's any quick solutions.

[5long]

For some reason during my further testing this patch is not working: selecting KDE-Desktop wouldn't eventually install it. I'll mark it as draft to prevent getting merged for now. But I'll try to find another way to achieve the original goal (assuming this idea will be accepted)

[5long]

• hide all the DEs in a group so they wont' take too much screen space
• ... and set immutable: true on them.

It doesn't look very neat but good enough to prevent users from getting errors:

[5long]

It turns out that I can skip netinstall to install the chosen package group from packagechooser: just use method: packages.

A nice side effect is: packagechooser is localized while netinstall isn't.

[vnepogodin]

We don't want that. Users should be able to control package selection as much as possible

These concerns should be reserved for new GUI installer(hidden selection unless user clicks on "advanced" to be able to show and unselect), while we still use calamares

[ptr1337]

Ive thought about this - Generally it seems to be a great idea but the only problem I really see, would be that updating the package list requires a full recompilation of calamares, which is done in chroot and then could result that we can not update due new libaries.

Then we would need to do a release all time. The only solution I see right now, would be creating for each desktop a "cachyos-kde-meta" or so, which defines the package list and calamares depends on.