I love Debian, but it’s installer is shit.
I’ve probably used it more than a hundred times now, but I still get confused about the current step sometimes.
It really is, I can use it, but it’s clunky compared to even Arch’s TUI. Gentoo is harder, but Gentoo isn’t trying to do what Debian is.
Another bad one is Fedora’s. I’m used to it, of course, but the placement of the buttons to exit screens is all over the fuck, and you better know what you’re doing in order to even set the hostname and make a user during install.
It’s one of the only installers that seems to take the longest compatatively and (afaik) doesn’t really let you leave it unaftended. Most other distros let you just set everything first then go, but Debian does that and then asks you what DE and other questions mid install…
Lol it’s not that hard. It’s just a matter of what you are used to.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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”.
I set up a kiosk on a Linux Mint machine today. From blank, unformatted drive to fully deployed kiosk, it took less time than just installing a base install of win11.
How did you set up the kiosk? I’ve been looking for an alternative to Windows Kiosk mode on Linux for a while now.
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.
The windows one seems exaggerated until you try to set it up with a regular local account.
Setting up a scratch install VM is such a pain.
Yeah, setup win 10 install on qemu may need to jump some hoop, especually when you want to enable features like gpu pass through.
Although qemu may not be as easy as virtualbox/vmware, the performance is worth it.
Setting up a local user account only is easy. Shift+f10 to open command prompt and then run OOBE\BYPASSNRO and then you can run the setup with zero network requirements and zero account requirements.
That no longer works.
Tried it on my girlfriend’s new gaming laptop about 4 months ago and it did nothing, so just went back to using my custom Rufus install.
With Rufus it doesn’t even ask for a MS account, indeed.
I do it every day for work. You must be doing something wrong.
It’s a simple command, kinda hard to mess up repeatedly.
It’s probably something to do with which Windows edition is used. This was just a consumer grade laptop after all
This is 100% true, but the chart inverts when you have a problem you’re trying to fix.
Isn’t mint a downstream product of Ubuntu? I haven’t paid attention to them since they were distributing images from a compromised WordPress site years ago 😂
Maybe I’ve been DDing Ubuntu for so long that I just couldn’t be bothered to try another distro based on it. I want to try a rolling release distro, but I’m too old to distro hop. All I care about is a functional system anymore.
Almost everyone using Linux installed it. Almost no one using Windows installed it.
The latter usually have someone to install it for them.
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.
and all of those numbers combined will still be less than 5% of users.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
What about Ubuntu?
It takes too long to listen to Lemmy users tell you why not to.
Yes, please stay away from Windows if you have such difficulties installing it.
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.
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.
I call bullshit. It only took me 3 hours to compile and install gentoo on my latest build and get proper desktop environment working. Granted I’m still tweaking the config files 4 years later, but it’s perfect!
Stupid list leaves off the most popular linux install and puts that fringe one in.
Unbuntu?
Which one are you calling fringe? These are all popular distros, with the exception of maybe Gentoo but that’s still very well known even if not that many people daily drive it. Also still makes sense in this context to include a well known distro that’s also known for being relatively hard to install
