The problem with Penguins Eggs...

I don't mean to talk bad about a project. I just say this in hopes to see a project improve. I see great potential in Penguins Eggs, if done properly.

Penguins-Eggs, for those who don't know, is a remastering tool to create your own Linux ISO. It's one I was attempting to use in creating the Fearless Geek OS respin of MX Linux. Yes, MX Linux has MX Snapshot and its own live USB remastering tools. But Penguins Eggs, with its ability to use Calamares, would grant me better customization options, plus the ability to customize the bootloader screen on t he Live USB. These are things MX Snapshot doesn't offer.

The problem I faced, however, was Grub, the bootloader, did not install properly on real hardware from the ISO that was generated. I would finish the operating system install, then reboot, and couldn't boot into the drive. Now I could use MX Boot Repair to fix it and it would work perfectly. But this isn't ideal.

Come to find out in my discussion with Piero Proietti, the creator of Penguins Eggs...well I'll just quote what he said after I tried to work out what was ultimately going on, but ultimately moved back to MX Snapshot...

OK,

I test just on VMs, can't literally test on real hardware, first becouse I have just my machine, second - and probably more important - I haven't time to do that.

But as far as I know real users work with eggs, build ISOs and I suppose install it on VM and real hardware with more or less success.

Wait, seriously? You're creating a remastering tool, but not testing out the ISOs on real hardware? OK. But now someone is reporting there's an issue on real hardware. That someone was me. Should it not not be fixed?

I'm pretty sure most people are going to create the ISOs to work on real hardware, ultimately, not just in a virtual machine. I'm sorry, but if you're doing a project like this and don't have time to test that ISOs generated from this install properly on real hardware, delegate that to someone else. The Penguins Eggs project is ultimately kind of pointless, otherwise, if the ISOs can't install on real hardware.

Fearless Geek OS isn't just tested on a virtual machine, but on real hardware. And if I didn't have time to test it on both, nor had the ability to delegate testing on real hardware to someone else, I probably wouldn't do this project.

Virtual machines are great for testing certain things, but you really don't know if something is done right until you do it on bare metal. And it still may be the case that Penguins Eggs isn't fully compatible with MX Linux. But now I wonder even if things would work properly if I had started with pure Debian or Devuan.

So my conclusion is Penguins Eggs is fine if you only want an ISO that will install in a virtual machine. If you want an ISO which will install on actual hardware, use something else.