System76 Moves Ahead With Writing Their Own OS Installer

Earlier this summer we heard how System76 might make their own distribution installer. They indeed are moving forward in this effort to construct their own installer from scratch and it's written in Rust.

System76 has been wanting a basic installer for their Pop!_OS Ubuntu derivative. They want a simple installer and where much of the work can be punted off to the GNOME Initial Setup stage. Following their research of Ubiquity and friends, they have decided to move ahead and write their own installer.

Their new installer consists of "Distinst" as the distribution installer back-end and and then there's the Elementary OS project hosting the installer's GUI frontend. Elementary has been helping the System76 crew construct their distribution.

This OS installer is not based upon the Calamares installer framework or any existing Linux installer frameworks. But in writing their own installer from scratch, they have decided to write it in the Rust programming language.

System76 hopes to have this installer ready for production by the 18.04 release in April of their Ubuntu downstream.

More details on this new installer via the System76 code. The code for this new installer is hosted on GitHub.