Yes, please stay away from Windows if you have such difficulties installing it.
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.
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.
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
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.
Do you mean using your existing Windows install, or installing it from scratch?
Installing windows takes stupidly long. You have to click through 60 pages and click “No, i don’t want to share my data” just for them to collect it anyway
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.
Biased as fuck lol. Installing windows is not difficult. I did it first time at the age of 8 witn WIndows 98 and their newer installers are made so the general public can do it. And the bloat and spyware? Thats windows dude. Its not meant to be your OS, its meant to spy on your ass at the benefit of being familiar and (relative) easy to use. Anything you do to it post clean install is your own tinkering. Linux distros are great yall, but install difficulty is not a metric I would use to attack windows. Comparing between distros makes sense.
This doesn’t say it’s difficult, just says there are others which are less difficult. Even if you accept everything at default, windows installs take much longer.
I’m not sure why you even think this is an attack on windows really. You keep saying windows is for those who want easy to use, so why not include the whole process?
Longer != difficult. Windows installs are easy as fuck and id say its as simple as linux mint.
The debloating is a choice and id say thats the same amount of work as installing stuff in linux because what it comes with is very limited.
Im a linux mint user btw
It’s easier than even mint. Because I’ve installed windows dozens of times and it has always worked out of the box. Always.
Friend gave me their old laptop that was sluggish and asked me to reinstall windows. I proposed Linux and promised them it’d work even better, they reluctantly agreed. I install mint. Sound not coming through headphones. I update everything that’s there to update, tried a bunch of shit and waste like an hour before I finally find a thread that suggested manually updating to a newer kernel version. That fixes it.
Now I know something extra for next time but if it were someone less stubborn, they’d have given up and went back to windows. Most people don’t know and don’t care about debloating, trackers and whatnot.
Tldr; Windows is the easiest OS to install because it works right out of the box. Many Linux distros are even easier to install, but don’t always work out of the box.
Linux has made leaps and bounds with usability and ease of installation but it’s no better than any other modern OS - which is a good thing. Installing Windows from a USB stick is not difficult - the simple path is literally, pick a language, select your wifi, choose who is logging in, click install and go grab a coffee. About the only difficulty if you can call it one is that some installs will ask for a serial number because it’s a commercial product.
Also, the number of questions & buttons during installation is one thing but the certainty of a functioning system is another. Linux is better at supporting old hardware, Windows is better at supporting new hardware. Choose accordingly if that matters.
Linux installs like Ubuntu take about 20 minutes.
The last time I installed windows 11 (thank God only once) it took me a total of 7 hours divided over 3 days. It was hell, requiring multiple iso downloads, multiple tries to burn a USB with a variety of tools, loads of searching and reading documentation, multiple BIOS settings and a BIOS update, multiple install attempts, searching, downloading and installing drivers, then finally on the winning install it still took like an hour with god knows how many “fuck off and do your job” clicks.
Mind you, this was on the same machine where right before I installed Linux on a separate M2 device
Windows installations are a horror show.
It can be quite difficult for puzzling reasons. I bought my laptop with no OS because it was cheaper to buy a Windows license separately. I downloaded the ISO and put it on a USB drive and … It wouldn’t boot. It took me half a day and I had to follow guides with various black magic which I can’t even recall what was about to finally get the thing to boot from USB. After spending over a day on that, I installed Ubuntu and set up dual booting in about 30 minutes.
As someone who has tried to install Windows from Linux, and Linux from Windows… The meme is accurate. Even getting the official Windows ISO on a USB from Linux or MacOS is a multi-hour journey. Want to only install Windows on part of your hard drive? There goes another 15 minutes. Maybe 30 minutes because it wiped your GRUB partition. Honestly, try to do anything but the default options in the Windows install and you’ll lose 2 hours.
Installing Linux? I’ve installed Arch Linux in under 10 minutes. Manjaro is literally flash ISO to USB using any program (Windows, Linux or Mac) and watch an installer spin for 20 minutes. Windows? You’ll be spending 20 minutes on your first “update”.
