butterknife — the terminal installer for Butterbian, the “pick your own WM” path just got its biggest release yet.
The new installer UI. The old menu is now a guided checklist: a step rail that shows where you are and what’s left (√ done, > editing, · pending), with each screen opening beside it instead of taking over. The info panel became an install plan — the contract you’re building as you configure, including a warning naming exactly which disk gets erased the moment you pick one. Install unlocks with a live countdown once every step’s done. Butter-gold theme throughout; terminal emulators get truecolor, the live console gets a 16-color rendering with console-safe glyphs. Still plain python3-urwid from the Debian archive — no new dependencies, no Calamares, no live-build.
Under the hood:
- zram swap now compresses with zstd (previously fell back to lz4 roughly 3:1 vs 2:1, and for swap, ratio is capacity). Still 50% of RAM, still no knobs.
- Installed systems now identify as Butterbian (ID=butterbian), so os-prober, other installers, and the GRUB snapshot menu show one canonical name.
- Disk picker no longer lists floppy drives (yes, really).
Same butterknife otherwise: erase-only, offline-capable, btrfs + Timeshift + grub-btrfs rollback, LUKS, zram, WM chooser at first login.
Download: https://get.butterbian.org
Release notes: Making sure you're not a bot!
