Installer loses focus

[ddalley]

The new LM 14 installer loses focus of the target device.
I have not seen this before, with any installer.

For example:

- choose sdb as the intended target device
- create the / partition
- when the installer finishes that, it selects sda, instead of staying focused on sdb

This is a big no-no that many people may not notice.

I really wish that installers were smarter. If I want to install to one device, the installer should be able to remove all other devices from the list, at least at some point, even if we have to do it manually. Give us that choice and fewer people will have MBR overwrite problems.

OpenSUSE, for example, even though _everything_ is set up to install to sdc, yup, it still wants to write grub to sda.

[cwsnyder]

That is because your BIOS default boot disk is the disk which is designated /dev/sda. Any install will attempt to write GRUB to the default MBR, regardless of where the distro is installed, so that the new distro will boot without the 'user' intervention.

[ddalley]

That doesn't address the flaw in the installer, however. This is something that LM installers have not done before.

[cwsnyder]

I think you will find that this is a 'feature' pushed by Ubuntu, whose installer Mint uses and doesn't change much. And I HAVE noticed this before in Ubuntu and other distribution's installers over the last 5 years. Relatively few distributions in that time ever bothered to ask to which disk GRUB should write in the Debian family with which I am most familiar.