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.
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.
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.
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 need to install all of my apps under Linux as well. Doesn’t make much of a difference. I don’t like the default browser, media player, torrent client, office suite, etc. that Mint ships with for example.
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.
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.
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 you’re entire IT infrastructure! Plug it in and it just…
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 trap 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 switching from M$ Home to Mint away from all of us sweaty, arrogant losers.
This sub is delusional
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.
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.
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
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 need to install all of my apps under Linux as well. Doesn’t make much of a difference. I don’t like the default browser, media player, torrent client, office suite, etc. that Mint ships with for example.
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.
Pretty sure mine took 20 minutes to burn to USB. Maybe I need better jump drives.
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.
debian should be a bit higher on that list, but it’s still easier than installing windows.
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 you’re entire IT infrastructure! Plug it in and it just…
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 trap 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 switching from M$ Home to Mint away from all of us sweaty, arrogant losers.