I posted this in Arch Bounty by mistake sice that is a sepparate project from Arch.

It would be good to add some profiles to the installation process. After installing the base system, you're offered with a list of profiles, o packages templates based on use cases, some examples:

* Desktop
* Notebook (apps, tweaks and optimizations for running on notebooks)
* Model
* Environment
* Console
* X.org
* DE
* Gnome
* Apps
* KDE
* Apps
* Xfce
* Apps
* Window manager
* Fluxbox
* Apps / Utils
* Xmonad
* Apps / Utils
* Awesome
* Apps / Utils
* Apps
* Gtk
* QT
* Lightweight apps

* Home Server
* File Server
* Media Center

* Server
* web server
* platform
* firewall
* mail

Every profile will have information of required and recommended packages, I think they could be official and community suplied profiles..

Every profile could suppply some optional groups, to allow more customization. If we can have the "metapackages" really suited for one thing the customization possibilities will be endless.

This metapackages could also supply example sets of config files for some programs provided by the community and the suggestions from the wiki.

We should supply the possibility to make custom profile install discs with the required sofware to make multiple installs.

Obviously that this won't force any package selection, only suggest what others think is good for the task and provide you with different options to go or to use your own: like when you select that will have a DE or X.org you must install a video driver, etc, etc.

This can also be used to provide Arch backends to other platforms such as Sugar, Moblin, Media Centers, etc.

As a final comment this idea could be implemented at a more basic level for ex, having a Xorg package that will show you a list of drivers, fonts, and add hal to rc.conf on install, this should make newcomers fall less in some really common pitfalls like no having input on X.

All the base information is ready on the wiki, my proposal is giving that a machine readable structure and allow users to see the critical info when selecting/browsing this metapackages.

This could be a post-install tasks after install is complete