Windows 11 without a Microsoft-Account = terminal required. Linux Mint = terminal not required.
Isn’t debloated windows just a regular windows install after running https://github.com/Sycnex/Windows10Debloater ? Is there more to it?
I prefer LTSC and Raphire’s debloat script https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat and I wouldn’t say it’s onerous. A nit-picky peeve with ad-hoc Windows installs is that setting the keyboard input for the installer doesn’t define the default, and that Windows 11 has gone backwards in terms of setting up default user profile settings, much more single user focused.
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.
The Steak Deck motivated me to finally make the jump to Linux. Until people can buy a Linux PC at the local electronics store, Linux will always be in a niche. And that’s not happening any time soon because of anti-competitive practices by Microsoft.
There is no way Gentoo is that low.
Um… My grandma installed Windows 11 on her computer and then ran a simple script I gave her after. You guys are delusional.
Was it a script to install your own crypto miner?
oh damn that sucks, thats why you dont click suspicious links
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
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.
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
Uuh yeah that can’t be right. The US isn’t even 20% of the world population, how can their prisons have even more people than that?Edit: never mind, I didn’t read properly
This sub is delusional
This community (we’re not that other site) has just delved into “windows bad” to the point of nauseating.
Probably going to filter this now especially after that idiotic chart that showed windows 8 being better than 10 with Linux having absolutely no problems whatsoever
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.
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.
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
And how many hours more to get all the drivers working properly?
If it takes multiple hours to install Windows for you, better to stick to OSes you do know.
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.
This actually happened to me before recently and all it took is one firmware setting. So frustrating.
Pretty sure mine took 20 minutes to burn to USB. Maybe I need better jump drives.
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).
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.
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.
Damn, which part did you get stuck?
The clicking “next” part?
The unplugging of internet to get a local account?
Or the running of a debloating script?
Wow, you’re a jerk.
Yep and somehow people who don’t know better are up voting him. Not surprising for this platform.
Yeah it’s not always that simple. You haven’t been around long enough to see the stuff that can go wrong with installing Windows. For example I recently had Windows refuse to see both SSDs in a machine. All because of something called Intel VMD. Took me a handful of attempts before I found the problem.
When Windows installs work they are fairly simple if long, but when they don’t work oh boy.
The unplugging of internet to get a local account?
Also they disabled that for Windows Home.
Some Lemmy users are actually just wankers. I would like it if you all stopped. It’s especially great when I have people like you who probably aren’t even experienced in tech.
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.
Actually no. It’s not Mint’s decision whether to start the install USB with UEFI or BIOS. It actually depends on what the firmware chose to start and how the install medium is formatted. Some install media is only setup for BIOS booting, some for only UEFI, and some can do both. If the firmware detects the medium as supporting both then it should choose UEFI first but this depends on what settings you have in the firmware, and if you choose an option at a boot menu as boot menus allow you to override the default. When it comes to actually installing the OS most sane installation software will look at how it booted and install that way. So if it detects it was starting with UEFI it will configure the install to be UEFI, same if it was started with BIOS it will install as BIOS. How does it know? UEFI variables are one way. They can normally only be accessed if the system was started with UEFI.
If you truly wipe a drive you wipe the partition table as well. You say the table is outside the file system formatting, and this is sort of true, but they are both just data on the disk. Disk don’t care where the partition table ends and the file system begins. In fact you don’t even need a partition table at all. Unlike some other systems Linux will let you put a file system straight on the disk, the whole disk, with no partition table in sight. It’s not recommended mind you, because it will freak Windows out if it sees it. Windows will see it as a blank disk and not so helpfully offer to format the thing. When I say format a disk, I mean the whole thing, partition table and all. It’s also not possible to make a partition tableless disk bootable in UEFI. In BIOS it’s possible though as BIOS doesn’t read partition tables. It just needs a boot sector and that’s it.
Also if you’re trying to change a disk from MBR to GPT, and you don’t care about data, you shouldn’t be converting it. You should be formatting/wiping the whole thing and making a new partition table. Which is normally what it offers to do if you tell it to erase everything and install it.
Edit: Getting down voted for actually knowing how computers work and bothering to explain it. Shock horror.
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.
Man, I spent like six hours getting my network drivers sorted out on my last debian install, and I could never get them working on mint. Clearly, my experience shows that linux must be fucking impossible to install. /s
Yes, mint is a huge leap forward. No longer will my mother be calling me up at four in the morning in tears, asking why tar -xv isn’t working to extract her crochet pattern archive. Nor will I have to have friends drive over to my house with a USB drive so I can give them a properly formatted bootable, or have to help my nephew build out a custom ubuntu server image for the r810 he wants to runs his minecraft server on. Now, we have one powerful solution! Anyone can run it, it’s got a nice UI! There’s uniform tools to manage deployment and user accounts across your entire IT infrastructure! Plug it in and it just… Works…
Wait.
Wait shit that’s just windows.I use linux every day, and mint really truly is a very good choice of OS for the average consumer. But the reasons it is a good choice for the average consumer (ease of maintenance, ease of install, compatibility, community) are all the same reasons windows is a good choice for the average consumer (ignoring privacy and FOSS philosophy, because holy shit does the average consumer not give a shit). Windows can be a pain in the ass, yes. “DLL hell” is a term for a reason. But linux can be equally awful to deal with when it breaks, especially for an inexperienced or non-tech-savvy user.
This sub can get really up it’s own ass about how easy linux is to work with. And, from our perspective, sitting here with our Tux tramp stamps, having used linux for twenty years, it is that easy. But we forget that nothing about computing is intuitive to the average person. This kind of Linux Supremacy bullshit just further entrenches the idea that linux users are all sweaty basement nerds and turns the people that could actually benefit from ditching M$ Home for Mint away from all of us sweaty, arrogant losers.
debian should be a bit higher on that list, but it’s still easier than installing windows.
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.
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?
Just install Windows 11
spoiler
This is a spoof on all the “Just install Linux” answers that make no sense.
Lol
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
I’ve heard Linux Mint is pretty straightforward. Might just go with it, at least at first. Thanks!
And yeah that’s what I would do anyways. Basically web surfing and whatnot
What are you intending to do with your laptop?
Mostly web surf, listen to music, take notes, do file organization, etc. I have my Steam Deck for gaming, and I’d probably use web-based apps for the engineering work I do before loading anything onto my laptop
But I may also want to download things like FreeCAD and other tools in the future
Any linux OS with a Desktop Environment will do that for you. If it’s a newer laptop you should probably go with Fedora and pick KDE Plasma desktop. Fedora has really good driver support for newer hardware and seems to work well with what framework laptops ship with.
https://fedoraproject.org/en/workstation/download
Linux Mint is also good however try to stay away from snaps starting out as they can cause confusing behavior due to how they’re implemented. A recent problem was Firefox from the snap store not working over VNC.
https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
To be honest your best bet would be to search linux distros in the framework forums and see what they’re experiencing.
Good luck with your new laptop. If you’re doing CAD go for AMD as that seems to work better for GPU intensive workloads on Linux.
Appreciate the tips! Yeah I think the forums will probably be my best bet since they’re focused on application -specific solutions.
I think I’ll grab an AMD CPU with Fedora/KDE Plasma and go from there.
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.
External over USB or network?
External SSD in an enclosure. So, it says it has a bad sector or bad generic error. I’ll put it on my wife’s windows laptop and do a chkdmsk /f/v/r and it cleans nothing up. And then it’ll work one time in my Linux mint. When I use it on my windows 10 living room machine then back to the mint computer - same error.
As long as I don’t put it into a windows computer Linux mint is happy
This is 100% true, but the chart inverts when you have a problem you’re trying to fix.
Mint was super easy. I just had to scratch my head for two days trying to figure out why the keyboard didn’t work after coming out of suspend. Had something to do with it being in a USB 3.0 port. Once I plugged it into a 2.0-port it worked.
The debate has never been so intense! It might not be the Year of the Linux Desktop, but that’s certainly a great one
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.
Its called Installing linux.
Where’s Arch if you don’t RTFM? (I mean we’ve got 2 windows install modes there… only fair)
Install windows, run debloat powershell script. Done.
Microsoft give no shortage of things to complain about without needing to exaggerate.
The first thing that has actually been useful here. Thanks!
Or just run Tiny11.
What does debloating entail exactly?
Disabling unnecessary background services, disabling telemetry, removing preinstalled adware. Easy to do with WinUtil by Chris Titus Tech.
