Calamares

The idea of Calamares arose from a desire of several independent Linux distributions to come together and work on a shared system installer. Instead of everyone working on their own implementation and forking forks of forks, why not work together on something that can be used by many? Calamares includes an advanced partitioning feature, with support for both manual and automated partitioning operations. It is the first installer with an automated “Replace Partition” option, which makes it easy to reuse a partition over and over for distribution testing. Got a Linux distribution but no system installer? Grab Calamares , mix and match any number of Calamares modules (or write your own in Python or C++), throw together some branding , package it up and you are ready to ship! The Calamares extensions repository holds more branding examples and specialized modules. Calamares is not an installer for any specific Linux distribution. It is used by Manjaro and KaOS and Maui and Netrunner Linux, but it isn’t “the Manjaro installer”. Calamares is an independent product. The Calamares team works closely with Linux distributors to provide the very best experience to their users. Calamares does not aim to be the ultimate “standard” installer of the Linux desktop. Many distributions already have more mature system installer solutions, but some don’t, and that’s where Calamares can be of use. A herd of Arch derivatives uses Calamares, as does a family of Debian and Ubuntu spins, Fedora remixes and openSUSE flavors. Since Calamares is designed to be customized, themed and branded by individual distributions, it can look very different when used by specific distributions. There will be distinct color schemes, welcome graphics, and while-you-wait slideshows. It is very unlikely that you will encounter a “plain” version of Calamares. The source code does have a default configuration, which looks like these screenshots: Many Linux distributions are in varying stages of adopting Calamares as their primary system installer.