Is there a possibility to make the installer images use an online installer similar to VanillaOS? (Currenlty utilizes their own installer backend and GTK frontend built for OCI-based distros)
This has several surface level advantages:
Much Smaller installer images (~1.5gb for VanillaOS)
Removes the need to have multiple installation builds for different hardware (Nvidia image used on install-time, no nvidia specific installer image)
Recovery mode (simple button on their frontend for a live OS with tools like gparted)
The main issues would come from having to redo a lot of work from the fedora atomic installer and if the frontend being GTK doesn’t feel right.
It used to be that the .iso uses online installers - you can even define the source for the image files. But I think more people wanted an offline installer, to the point that even the Flatpak apps are now provided on the .iso.
they are, but the giant size for including flatpaks and flatpak runtimes is not worth it in my opinion. Maybe it should be an option instead, the easy online installer with the small file size or if you want an offline installer image preloaded with the flatpaks, and the flatpak runtimes, and the specific drivers for your device beforehand.
At this time there are no plans to do that. We previously had an online installer, but we removed every trace of it from the internet due to it barely working and not being worth supporting.