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This sub is delusional
Like every linux community. Living in a bubble that doesn’t exist.
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
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.
Windows 11 without a Microsoft-Account = terminal required. Linux Mint = terminal not required.
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.
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
well ok.
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
no, you read that correctly, theres currently 2 billion people in the US prisons :p
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.
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
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 btwIt’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.
I believe you, but my experience is the opposite. Generally wifi doesnt work ootb on Windows for systems i’ve set up, and newer games are crashy until you install the latest chipset drivers. The drivers Windows installs seem to be many versions back and have been unstable IME
on Ubuntu or Fedora i’ve not had a single issue in over a decade. Not one time has a component not worked for me on the first boot. It’s been truly flawless. Games work at full performance right away.
My only possible explanation is that we must be working with pretty different hardware
Exactly. Linux mint was fine on my laptop, but only later i had to upgrade kernel for the amd drivers, but overall its the closest to a spotless experience ive had. But what you said is 1000% correct!
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.
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.
I kind of miss the Win98 install process. I did it so many times… Tried making a Win98 virtual machine, but it just wasn’t the same without all the real floppies. The boot disk, the drivers. The JazzJ Jackrabbit shareware. Good times.
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”.
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!
What does debloating entail exactly?
Disabling unnecessary background services, disabling telemetry, removing preinstalled adware. Easy to do with WinUtil by Chris Titus Tech.
Or just run Tiny11.
That’s literally only the first step.
I’ve never “debloated” Windows so idk about the top half.
The bottom half is accurate. Debian, Fedora, and Mint are easier to install than Windows 10 or 11. Not that Windows is difficult, it’s just a bit clunky and idiosyncratic.
I assume Microsoft doesn’t care much about the installer since it’s generally only used by OEMs, whereas for Linux distros it’s a first impression so it has to be polished.
No excuse though. Try the “install as oem” of Linux Mint. You get an install with temporary oem account, you can update the system, install additional programs, then click “Prepare for shipping to end user” and on next boot you’re greeted with a setup screen.
That sounds pretty nice. More installers should have something like that
It’s very user friendly. I switched last year and haven’t looked back. I game on it constantly.
Well, if you want accuracy, then no the meme isn’t really that accurate.
On an updated Win11 system the Shift+ F10 command prompt “OOBE\BYPASSNRO” trick still works to setup a new system without Internet (and by extension, without a MS account) so that’s like most of the battle right there
The rest is taken care of with your choice of debloat scripts that are out there
compared to clicking “next” on Fedora, Debian, or Mint
I’d say using a simple straightforward GUI is much easier than an arcane combination of commands and keypresses
Wait, did we just reach a point where a command line input is needed for Windows and Linux just needs to press a few buttons??
I can’t find it now, but there was a meme about that here. How 20 years ago vs present the two are flipped.
Only if you don’t count installing drivers
Well, I didn’t say it should be ranked towards the bottom lol, if we want to make this graph accurate it would be below arch but above “Windows the normal way”
If you install arch with the archinstall script you basically get a setup wizard
And installing a Microsoft-account-free Windows install is only the first step of de-bloating the system. So I’d say debloated Windows in somewhere between Arch and Gentoo
I think i misunderstood you my bad
I used AtlasOS on my windows partition. Had to cause for some reason steam streaming was borked and would only black screen. And now I’m too lazy to swap back over to cachyos. Lmao. Waiting to see that bug is fixed.
I had to install Windows 11 on something a few weeks ago so I decided to do it without an account, it was nowhere near as difficult to do it as this sub would lead you to believe. Pressed a key combination to load up the command prompt then typed in a relatively short command. The GUI restarted and that was it.
Yeh, it’s there.
But Linux installers would straight up ask you. So you don’t even need to hit the CLI
Windows requires pressing next 12 times, what are you people smoking and can I haz?
See, Ubuntu only requires pressing next 6 times, and Fedora is only 8.
That’s essentially what it boils down to nowadays.
Unless you want tpm backed full disk encryption in which case… Good luck
One click for Mac and windows, a lifetime of fun for Linux (except arch w/sysdboot which works pretty good)
I’m happy with regular password FDE, i think i’m more likely to encounter hardware failure (and then need to read the drive from another machine) than theft of the drive.
It’s a good point though, I’m sure many people do need this feature. Ubuntu is “working on it” but so far i guess it’s mostly not working except for VMs
I have a media center that serves over the internet via VPN, I don’t want to leave it unencrypted but I also don’t want to have to go home and type in a pass every time California has a power outage, which is monthly during the dry fire season and >monthly during the “storm” season. I wouldn’t care as much for my personal laptop or anything, but for servers it seems like an absolute must have and…what is Linux for if not servers?
I think the traditional way to do that is via dm-crypt, which you can set up with an ssh server.
You can also use a network-shared file rather than a password for LUKS but it’s not as straightforward to set up as a password. If you are doing something like tailscale then it’d be unlocked as long as you are on the VPN
Typing in a password in-person at a data center would be a huge hassle, agreed
But…it’s literally what the tpm chip is for. Like there may be other options, but the tpm chip’s purpose in life is to do this thing. And it’s been doing that for a decade. Seems pretty traditional to me. But Linux folks in some venues treat it like a plague that needs to be eradicated.
Looking at RHEL docs it seems to also work there. The same instructions probably work in Fedora but idk I’ve never done it myself
With a MS account. Which spies on everything and sells your info.
Use Rufus, skip online account and automatically opt out of telemetry.
What is the very first thing you do after installing the super private and much sekure Linux? You download Steam and give Valve your data. This is bullshit.
So is Microsoft
Yes, that’s my point. You will eventually log into something when using the computer. So while it’s weird that MS made it mandatory to sign into Windows 11, who cares.
They can also get your data without an account if they wanted.
On Linux, you can install Steam inside a sandbox for better security. Easy to do with either Flatpak or Bubblejail. This makes it so that Steam does not have full file system access.
Not something most people are gonna do. If you need privacy and security on the level where even Steam worries you, Windows can be made private too. It’s not even that hard. You just install a different ISO that allows local accounts and do all the necessary tweaks to harden it.
Flatpak is installed on basically every Linux distribution. Literally all I do to install Steam is go to the Software Center and search “steam” and click install. It takes 2 clicks.
You know that Steam is run on Arch right?
Oobe\bypassnro
Thank me later
Or just use software that you don’t need to mod to do what you want. That’s easier.
Literally not a mod
Do I think needing to do this is fucking stupid? Yes
Do I still put up with Microsoft’s bullshit because Linux is actively worse (as a parallel Linux user)? also fucking yes
I’ve been asking for several years for anything remotely resembling proof of this.
Will you be the first person to actually provide it? (I swear to fucking god if you link me to the terms of use…)
How do you think they advertise to you in the search bar?
They don’t? Very first thing I turn off is that shit show of a function.
However, let’s imagine you’re someone who leaves that on even though it objectively sucks…the answer is cookies. Your spyware example is cookies.
It would be awesome if someone created an OS that didn’t exploit such a resource for financial gain…
But then you have to wait 45 minutes for Windows update to spin, and potentially hang in the middle
Is it difficult for you to wait?
No, that’s fair. Annoying but not difficult.
I don’t even know what this graph is even supposed to mean. Bitch about Windows all you like but the installation process is typically very simple.
There is no X axis so I’m going to assume it means potatoes per guinea pig
I guess it means that no one here knows what Windows Debloated is and didn’t read far down enough to see regular windows marked as very easy to install.
Boot off usb, create partitions, wait, spend five screens clicking ‘no’ on all of the options, unplug ethernet so it allows you to make a local account, wait, login, spend 15 minutes uninstalling all of the preinstalled nonsense, disable all of the advertising on the task bar and desktop, pretend the rest of the telemetry doesn’t exist, download and install the latest drivers from each manufacturers website. Very simple.
Man. Last time I just wanted to check if my new laptop was working properly, so I booted up it’s preinstalled Windows. I literally had to look up how to get Windows to get me into Explorer without creating an account or connecting it to my network.
It took me about 25 minutes and Windows was already installed on the damn thing.
It took 15 minutes from booting a prepared Fedora stick to logging in.
I honestly believe that, by now, Linux is no more difficult than Windows. People are just not used to the differences.
You got a point up until you login.
Afterwards, just run a powershell script that automatically uninstalls the bloat and disables all the stuff you don’t want. Takes 30 seconds at most.
Drivers are automatically installed via Windows update for everything except Nvidia.
It has gotten more difficult. I remember windows 7 being just clicking Next until it was done. Win10 requires a signup, clicking no on several telemetry pages with dark patterns, a whole bunch of BS “features”.
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.
Almost everyone using Linux installed it. Almost no one using Windows installed it.
You don’t think that many people build their own Windows PCs? Linux gaming isn’t that old in the grand scheme of things, and there’s plenty of people who dual boot for various reasons.
I’d almost be willing to bet that there are more people who’ve installed Windows on their PC than there are people who’ve installed Linux from a pure numbers standpoint.
Most gaming PCs are pre built. Boutiques have been a business for decades. And every major PC OEM has a gaming division.pc building is niche.
PC building is niche, yes, but do you think “almost no one” builds PCs, like OP said? And that’s not even including the people who’ve had to install Windows on a pre-built system for one reason or another.
My point is that OP sounds like a smug Linux user shitting on people who use Windows. Even 5% of Windows users is too big a group of people to be described as “almost no one” simply because of how big the userbase is. That would be like saying, “Almost no one installs Linux” because Linux only makes up a small portion of the worldwide PC userbase.
I build my own systems. And I dont know what y’all are smoking but a typical windows installation has the complexity of opening a jar of pickles. Next next yes and away we go.
Linux on the other hand…
Now, if you want to debloat and install without a ms account then yes. But then… Really… Who does that? (i mean of the typical windows users
Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian, Mint are also next, next, yes
But those pickle jars also use your monitor’s native resolution
Windows on the other hand…
That’s what I’m saying. Windows installation is idiot-proof. And I’m sure there’s enough people who maintain their own systems or at the very least have had to install Windows for one reason or another that to say that “almost no one” who runs Windows installed it themselves is just the “Linux Master Race” talking.
Avoiding MS account and many manual parts of the installation (opting out of shit) is like two clicks in Rufus before installation. Everyone should do it.
Installing endeavourOS was easier than Windows because of all the ads you need to bypass and the telemetry options on Windows. The partitioning options on endeavourOS were easier too plus if necessary one can use a browser. The only difficulty there was on EndeavourOS which the Windows installer didn’t have was picking a wm.
That was the most complicated installer I’ve seen for a Linux distro beside arch32 which doesn’t even come with archinstall.
and all of those numbers combined will still be less than 5% of users.
Almost no one using Windows installed it.
I think Windows installs are really common, at least going off of the size of online gaming communities who generally build their own PCs.
The latter usually have someone to install it for them.
Mac users:
Well Mac users do too… Well they don’t… but someone does.
I was that someone for some family members. I felt icky the whole time.
I once upgraded a girl’s parents’ computer to System 8 and didn’t realize it wasn’t supported. Fucked up the BIOS (or whatever Macs used back then) and they had to ship it back to Apple to get fixed. I did not hear from her again.
But I haven’t actually installed Mac OS since about Puma. New operating systems just come down in the normal software update. But I still cherish my OS X Beta DVD.
A couple months ago my sister bricked her mac somehow… it wouldn’t boot past the stupid white screen with a ? on it.
Had to edit random shit on the built in installer to get it to talk to apple correctly and pull the correct OS image to fix itself. It was a full OS install/recovery.
Easy enough because I understand linux/unix and underneath that’s all it is… but mac users are just stupidly lost… And to get to some of those tools, because they’re so buried underneath the “MAC experience”… it’s a pain in the ass too.
I can’t be bothered to remember what version it was… I hate touching macs. I only did that one cause it was my sister.
Easy enough because I understand linux/unix and underneath that’s all it is… but mac users are just stupidly lost… And to get to some of those tools, because they’re so buried underneath the “MAC experience”… it’s a pain in the ass too.
As a Mac user since System 1.0 with over 20 years of experience using Linux for Fortune 500 companies and major government agencies: Most people are stupidly lost, regardless of the OS they’re using.
Question mark standardly means it can’t find the drive. Used to be hold down the alt key to select boot drive. If nothing comes up still plug into Ethernet in some manner, then boot again with alt, should pull an online os installer that will bring you to the disk utility and such. Can troubleshoot the drive from there and figure out if it needs repairing / formatting / replacing
Where does a Hackintosh fall in?
At the top because you risk going to jail for violating the Apple terms of service/end user license agreement.
You do not risk going to jail, come on lol. People are so dramatic about doing the most minor unenforced crimes I swear
lol. They only ever pursed anyone for selling Mac clones or hardware for doing it. And the hardware was just a preconfigured usb drive with a motherboard connector on it. I think there were actual Apple devs moonlighting as hackintosh contributors.
The hardest one at all. You have to afford a new computer every 2 years.
I don’t think you know what a Hackintosh is.
This is also 99% of Windows users
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.
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.
It works over USB 3.0, it sounds like you just have a broken or corrupt drive.
It normal does work with USB3, yes. And no, this pendrive works perfectly fine and I’ve used it to install many other OSes since.
Edit: and I might add that I finally found the solution online so I was definitely not the only one confronted to this problem
