Actually, not exactly with OpenSUSE's since some recent versions of YaST (and since very recently Windows' installer too).

For openSUSE their automatic building system (OBS for the RPMs themselves, and Kiwi for the images out of those RPMs) can automatically build a bunch of pre-installed image.

To speed things up, once you've selected all the installation options, instead of installing every single RPM one by one YaST will check whether it might have a ready to use image which contain most of the base stuff, and then only install one-by-one the extra RPMs not covered by the base image.


(Since very recently, Microsoft Windows' installer also attempts the same. Except they have only 1 single WIM image, and you don't get to select anything, so you can further automatically customize the base image, you need to use the control pannel to remove/add component. So: ...meh...)

(Some Ubuntu specialist should come and coment whether they are also implementing something similar).

Since the development of BTRFS, its "seed partition" feature should make it extremely trivial to on-the-flight deploy such an image to the installation target while the system is hot.

But since RedHat dropped BTRFS, Suse is propbably the only ones likely to attempt this.



I'm just mentally picturing a full blown GParted-style / Yast storage / and "whatever it was called in Anaconda" storage manager running inside the tiny screen of a 4.5"-5" smartphone.

:-D


Sadly, that's a stupid limitation of ARM : most devices don't feature any automatic peripheral discovery.
You need to hardcode the device tree inside the device-specific kernel.

But it would be cool to imagine a USB-OTG Sailfish installation bootdisk.

Or an installer that you launch on the phone over the USB by using "fastboot boot installer.img" (i.e.: an actual touch GUI bolted on top of the recovery image).