brother, 99% of users will never even consider installing their own os. the issue isn’t that Linux is hard to install, the issue is that pretty much anyone brave enough to even mess with their operating system is either already on Linux, a boomer, or trapped by professional software that isn’t available on Linux (that’s me, a videographer)
the only way Linux is breaking out of extreme obscurity is if it starts coming pre-installed on commercially available and desirable hardware. the steam deck did more for Linux in a single product launch than the entire decade of combined efforts before that. before the deck i would have said it was simply never going to happen, but who knows. maybe it’ll be up to eccentric billionaires that never went public with their companies to push the Linux future we all want.
I want to buy a Framework laptop soon. I have the option to choose which Linux distro is best for me and load that on.
Any suggestions?
Transitioning from Windows to Linux Mint was effortless for me, everything worked out of the box and i haven’t typed a line of code yet. All i’ve had to to do is install Diodon to get the clipboard history feature.
However all i’ve done with it is internet and office work, basic stuff. No gaming, no video editing, no 3D animation or any such. I think if you have a mature and complicated creative workflow it’s totally possible that you’ll struggle to move to Linux
System76 has their own OS. You should start there and move on if you wanted to.
PopOS! Is not as user friendly as it seems to linux veterans.
Correct, horse battery staple! (Puns) I have had issues with it occasionally when I tried but it is a start.
I usually suggest linux mint with cinnamon desktop for casual users or Fedora with KDE Plasma for power users .
I still use Mint. Even though I’m having problems lately with mounting external drives. I mained Elementary OS for a while but something about it seemed…shallow.
This is 100% true, but the chart inverts when you have a problem you’re trying to fix.
Um… My grandma installed Windows 11 on her computer and then ran a simple script I gave her after. You guys are delusional.
oh damn that sucks, thats why you dont click suspicious links
Was it a script to install your own crypto miner?
Unless you install Linux mint with multiple displays. Holy 1 sec flickering sideways displays Batman. I don’t remember what I did exactly to fix but probably single display until drivers are all installed.
Omg please tell me when you do, I’m running Mint on my laptop but want to migrate my desktop over soon which has multiple displays
I’m pretty sure that was the fix. Start the installation with a normal single monitor. Once the OS is installed, run update manager to download and install updates. This would include GPU drivers. My second monitor is in portrait mode which I think was the culprit.
So by linux, you mean not every open OS? Can we add freebsd? Not the easiest but lots of users willing to help on a forum post.
Where’s Arch if you don’t RTFM? (I mean we’ve got 2 windows install modes there… only fair)
would love to see some actual market research on this. sit down a sample of users, have them install then use some OSs. interview them on their experience. rather than yknow making up data
well people dont actually install OSs
Not data, It’s a meme
the only thing cooler than a meme with fake data is a meme with real data
So, a chart?
like this
Even better if made with multiple ussr groups, including tech-savy and people who never installed an os before, as well as people already used to windows and linux.
i was on a instance called kbin.cafe after fedia.io moved to mbin, for no reason. did it turn into a lemmy instance without redirect?
no i don’t think so, probably just a coincidence. i have never used kbin or mbin
Maybe, but Linux will fuck up that boot partition within a year and any non-techie will be screwed.
Why is Debian more difficult than Fedora? I could understand older versions, but these days they fixed pretty much all the small annoyances. No need to use the “nonfree” iso, because that’s integrated into the installer. And post install sudo works as expected out of the box. I’d say they should be equal.
This sub is delusional
Why? I use Mac mostly, but recently built a PC. I installed two Linux distros on it without even worrying about what drivers I needed, and I even have an NVidia GPU.
I also created a Windows partition and neither WiFi nor Bluetooth worked out of the box. Linux was objectively easier.
debian should be a bit higher on that list, but it’s still easier than installing windows.
Like every linux community. Living in a bubble that doesn’t exist.
Why?
Installing any operating system is often a hassle. This comes in part from my own experience trying to understand the unguided partition recommendations of a Bazzite (basically Fedora on low level) install. I got through it, but it was certainly no easier than Windows.
Ubuntu install takes 20 mins, including download and burning the USB. Make it 30, maybe?
My only windows 11 install took 7 hours, multiple days, BIOS visits, searching for documentation and hair pulling, all with the same machine.
Yeah, there is a difference
Just to add another anecdatum, I had the exact same experience installing Windows 11 this year. I have never had this much trouble installing an OS in the 20 years I’ve been screwing with computers.
I believe your anecdote, but my Linux Mint install also took multiple days, BIOS visits, and lots of documentation searching. It’s a factor of how much the OS makers anticipated the specific hardware configuration and how out of date the partitions are configured.
My main point is that both can be frustrating, and there’s nothing consistent.
Oh so you’re bad at using computers. Got it. I can have windows 11 without telemetry in 10 minutes and with a local user profile instead of a Microsoft account. This argument about what you were able to do and how long it took you doesn’t make you look cool or smart. It makes you look like you have no idea what you’re doing.
He may have been trying to install it on a potato or on something atypical. I struggled to get a clean Windows 10 install on a system with an old ASUS motherboard using its RAID controller and AHCI. Support didn’t seem to understand the problem, but they were a good sounding board while I figured it out over 3 evenings. By contrast, Windows 11 took all of 10 minutes to install with Rufus on a modern system. Sometimes you just end up with a system configuration that isn’t quite supported out of the box by a given OS, and it takes some third party drivers and some intermediary configurations to get things to load before you can get things working properly.
How the fuck. I seriously want to know. My W11 IoT installed under half an hour.
Did you also get most of the extra software installed at the same time or did you need to spend extra time getting all your non-OS software installed to make your computer actually useful?
Windows itself was installed during that time. Additional software installation took a few minutes. I installed stuff when I needed it thorough the day.
So nothing to really make Windows actually useful on reboot. In nearly the same amount of time with a Linux distro, you get a system that may well not need anything extra to be productive with on 1rst reboot.
(And yes, I have installed both OS systems from scratch dating back to dos).
Do you mean using your existing Windows install, or installing it from scratch?
I’m not sure what you mean by an existing Windows install. If you mean going through launch screens on a new device that’s configured the OEM setup, then no, I have experience (granted, now in the past) with doing Windows installs from blank drives.
That answers my question, I meant the latter.
This isn’t true. Try Linux Mint or Ubuntu, their installers are much better. Those installers used by Fedora, RedHat, and even SUSE can be a bit weird.
They specifically say unbloated Windows as well which while it’s not as difficult as they make out is still somewhat annoying.
I’ve recently had a Windows installer fail to see my NVMe drives until I changed some random UEFI setting because it was missing a driver. Linux could see it just fine, as could Hirens boot.
Not to make a “Gotcha”, but Linux Mint was the other distro I tried, as I’ve complained about before. The first release I tried, which was less than a year old (on a 2+ year old computer) didn’t even run the wifi, audio, or bluetooth drivers correctly.
And, I had that same type of UEFI setting on Linux; Mint wanted to install on a GPT drive record, when my old drives (on Windows) used an MBT. It’s a conversion process both OSes will help with, but Mint gave some errors with it, and it was honestly easier to use Windows’ tools to get it done. Not even sure why Mint was insistent on it. Oh, and a mostly distro-agnostic annoyance: While attempting that conversion and making extra space for the GPT format, I ended up wiping more of the drives than needed during conversion because the partition manager used on several distributions uses bad messaging, and incorrectly refers to an individual partition under /dev/nvmesda0# as a “device”.
UEFI won’t boot from MBR drives unless it’s in BIOS compatibility mode. What format the drive is in isn’t determined by a firmware setting, though it can affect the boot process. I don’t think you actually understand what you are talking about here. The easiest way to install OSes both Windows and Linux is by wiping the drive, which would have solved this issue. Dual boot on single drive configurations normally have issues and will always be more complicated. It’s better to use two drives where possible in most cases. I suggest you read up on BIOS vs UEFI and how partition tables work if you want to do a complex setup like that.
Mint is known for having older kernels and therefore not supporting the latest hardware. They have a different edition for newer computers called Linux Mint Edge edition. Something Arch derived like CachyOS or another distro using recent kernels will always have the best support for bleeding edge hardware. The CachyOS installer is also pretty friendly, though maybe not as much as Mint.
Note that my post said “old drives” - plural. Mint was being installed on a secondary, formatted drive, and refused because that drive was not GPT-formatted (that record exists outside of the filesystem formatting). At the time, the BIOS was not set to force UEFI, so this was Mint’s decision, not the BIOS’s, and I don’t understand it. I left Windows alone on a different drive.
Believe me, I did plenty of reading up on BIOS UEFI settings just to resolve the issue. I still don’t claim to be a master, but I at least know enough to express how annoying the reconfiguration can be - independent of which OS you’re choosing.
Installing regular Windows 10/11 is definitely more than twice as painful than installing Debian 12.
Once, I was trying to install Windows 10 and wasted an entire day! The installation would systematically fail at the beginning of the installation with a BS error message that doesn’t give any hint about what’s going wrong. In the end it just didn’t like USB3 as an installation media! I reflashed it to a USB2 and it worked, but OMG was it super slow ! It took literally hours to install !!!
Debian, even as a noobie, you’ll go from flashing your ISO to a booted system within an hour. If you’ve done it once before, you will get it done in 20 minutes.
It works over USB 3.0, it sounds like you just have a broken or corrupt drive.
What the hell. I’ve never seen such an issue. Microsoft is so considerate; they provide us with cool little surprises like that from time to time. ♥️
I’ve seen it a lot (I do PC builds/repairs as a side gig). I just assume it will cause me grief from the start and keep both USB2 and USB3 sticks handy.
To be fair I’ve had the issue with Unraid too, but only on one brand’s B450 motherboards in my testing. I didn’t have a whole bunch to try of course but MSI and Asus was fine, Gigabyte not. X570 didn’t have this problem in my experience.
Arch is probably easier to install than Debian nowadays.
No.
Debian takes a few clicks and you have a working desktop.
Installing debloated windows is not difficult at all.
And how difficult is it to keep it debloated? MS seems to be hellbent on pushing their crap into everyone’s face.
Every Windows apologist: “I will keep current on the hacks to fix it forever, easy.”
I’m glad I invested the time learning Linux before I had kids and now have no time for anything.
I hope you don’t think I’m being a Windows apologist. I’m not defending Windows itself, I’m just saying that it isn’t that hard to debloat it.
Understood, sorry to imply that you were.
I would say it is, it’s extra installation steps. Fedora I just click a handful of buttons and the OS is installed with no Spyware
Its called Installing linux.
Hey! You missed nixos!
First time install for smb. Double the windows Bar.
Second time (if you backed up your config file)
No bar!
