The system installer is the software on your USB flash dongle that installs the operating system to the computer.
- YaST (Yet another Setup Tool)
- Among the very best, possibly the very best
- Used by SUSE and OpenSUSE only
- Is the most capable installer I have used
- Incredible for controlling partitions, filesystems, hibernation, swap, etc.
- Calamares
- Among the very best
- Used by many distributions such as Manjaro, EndevourOS, KDE Neon, Garuda, Debian Live Medium, Siduction, Spiral, etc.
- Can be programmed by the distribution maintainers to be extremely powerful or very simple
- Ubiquity
- Used by Canonical for Ubuntu desktop installations. Also Linux Mint uses this
- It works, it isn't bad, but it is very limited compared to Calamares and YaST
- Subiquity
- Used by Canonical for Ubuntu server installations
- 2022 in testing for deployment to Ubuntu Desktop (Canary desktop image) and to replace Ubiquity
- Developed in secret by Canonical engineers; I guess they were also annoyed with Ubiquity?
- I tested this installer and it doesn't offer anything better than Ubiquity from what I can observe
- Anaconda
- Used by RHEL, CentOS, Fedora
- Works well enough, nothing special though
- Debian-Installer
- Used by Debian
- It has improved significantly since its beginnings but it is still extremely limited compared to the best