Julian Sparber
Julian Sparber is a free software developer living in Bologna, Italy. He's a long-time contributor to the GNOME desktop stack, as well as various GTK third-party apps. Most recently he's worked on systemd installer infrastructure as part of a Sovereign Tech Fund project. He also serves on the GNOME board of directors, and is part of Modal Collective.
Session
Linux doesn't have a unified way to be installed. Every distribution implements their on installer with a different feature set and UX. systemd-sysinstall is a tool to install an OS to a device. It leverages repart to format the disk and bootctl to manage UEFI and the boot partition and supports disk encryption and TPM integration. In addition, it exposes a varlink interface to be used by graphical installers.
In this talk we will explore what sysinstall does, how the GNOME OS installer (gnome-setup) leverages it to install GNOME OS, why distributions shipping GNOME should switch to gnome-setup, and how other desktop environments can build installers using the same stack.