Installing OS, 10 years ago:
Windows: click a couple of buttons enter username and password
Linux: Terminal hacking, downloading shell scripts from github
Installing OS today:
Linux: click a couple of buttons, enter username and password
Windows: Terminal hacking, downloading shell scripts from github.
Link to video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qKRmYW1D0S0
To be entirely unbiased here, this covers user friendly distros that pretty much blow windows away for “default experience”.
Windows has adware and scareware - more so it has config-cluster-fuckification (I believe this is the academic term for it?). This is where windows lost me - when it started bundling basic config options together to force you to relinquish your privacy. Now it’s “edit the registry or gtfo”…
Windows 9x was extremely time consuming to install with multiple reboots and before that it was all config files. Out of the box 95 couldn’t play media, connect to the internet (thanks trumpet), even access a cd. Normies bought machines pre-installed and got help when the system shit itself. Before there were scripted alternatives large scale Windows deployments were all imaged because of the hours it took to set up a single machine swapping floppies and writing to spinning rust. You had to reboot numerous times and use third party drivers and apps for everything. I recently installed a disposable Win 10 to do a firmware upgrade and Microsoft have come a long way though having to disconnect the Internet to get a local login is very dark.
Before there were scripted alternatives large scale Windows deployments were all imaged because of the hours it took to set up a single machine swapping floppies and writing to spinning rust.
My first internship was patching a ton of Win 98 systems and it involved walking up and down rows of cubicles waiting for the next step of the installation to get done and hit a couple keys
Yep I don’t remember ever windows install being fast or smooth. And even Slackware was straightforward 20 year ago
And even Slackware was straightforward 20 year ago
Still is.
They differ a lot. I don’t understand why Microsoft does not want to improve on this situation. At minimum take all questions at once, or collect answers from existing installation. Maybe have some profiles of answers like wipe disk and privacy mode.
I don’t understand why Microsoft does not want to improve on this situation.
Windows is the side hustle, They sell server space now.
Right, so lets shutdown Windows as it does not bring in enough money.
I don’t think that would be a good idea, to let it rot away. It is a business that brings in money after all, and it keeps the users using Microsoft office(Office 365) and all their products. They need to keep it alive.
They can half ass it, stuff it with ads, rake in the income and not lose enough users to worry. They have a monopoly and can just keep milking users.
It works for a while but they will lose market share over time. The home users are mostly not locked in to anything. It is just them that might use their pc at home for work(they should use their work laptop for that). Nowadays most things are webbased. Console/Steamdeck/Android/Chromebooks exists. Microsoft even made Visual Studio Code for any OS so coders can use any OS. The need for Windows is shrinking as people development alternative software for other platforms. It just take time.
It works for a while but they will lose market share over time.
The average user thinks their having a spell cast on them if they hear Linux. People are too afraid to learn how to use Windows let alone switch.
I think many is afraid. It is unknown OS. No one likes change. Many thinks IT is hard. especially elder people. However:
- There is to few places to even buy a computer with Linux on it.
- No ads on TV or similar, nowhere to test, not a single .exe file to run and test it out
- Works differently - need to relearn.
A kid does not have any problem with the above. This is why Steam Deck is selling. It is just fun to test something new with your friends and see what all the buttons do. Seen as cool. Any guess where this is going when they get adult?
The people able to figure out Linux will move over, but I don’t think a typical Windows user that goes on Facebook and uses Excel is going to understand or care enough to leave. They are use to being abused.
privacy mode
Keep dreaming. Only Apple has privacy mode they call Lockdown mode.
Microsoft’s most important customers are businesses, who generally don’t deal with this (they have corporate images). Home users also generally don’t deal with this given they buy a computer that has already been configured.
Linux-based systems have always needed to be better because almost no one buys a computer with $DISTRO already installed and configured.
Back in 1997 I was like “Ooh, Debian is mildly easy to install (compared to Slackware). Just need to engage my brain a few times maybe.”
(The first Slackware guide I read in 1996 had an ominous warning about getting the ModeLines right in XFree86 or the monitor will catch fire. This, fortunately, was a little bit of exaggeration. Over/under refresh frequency protection was already a thing.)
Now? “Oh no I fucked up my password shit and can’t login. I’ll need 5 more minutes to completely reinstall this Raspberry Pi image. I should have engaged my brain!”
Shit, we’ve gotten to the point that your average desk jockey can probably install freaking FreeBSD on the first try. If that’s not a good sign I don’t know what is.
Recently I decided I no longer wanted LUKS encryption on my laptop because I don’t travel anymore. So I followed the steps to do an in-place drive decryption. It worked, but I had missed a step to update the bootloader. So I fired up a live distro, chrooted to the installed system and 2 minutes later I had a working system.
Laughs in Gentoo
Compiles in Gentoo
Also horses in Gentoo
It took me two hours from the moment I started popping my laptop case open to add a new SSD to first boot on Linux. And figuring out how to disable secure boot on Acer’s fancy ass BIOS was what took most of the time.
You can use Gnome Disks to do that with buttons instead of opening /etc/fstab
Windows is only for games; macOS and Linux are for work. Once they catch up, it will be bye-bye Windows.
Maybe for home users. Working at an MSP, I can’t see small to medium sized businesses making any changes here anytime soon, especially those that use specialized software built only for Windows.
In my experience, many business applications now run on the Web or are being upgraded to be. Where I work Windows pcs endure only for those who have to do technical drawing, most terminals are Ubuntu updated by ansible scripts and connected to an active directory domain running on Samba. The few PCs with Windows are slowly disappearing as hardware is upgraded ( medium-sized company with about sixty PCs ). There are also a couple of Mac’s used by in-house developers/IT.
I play games on Linux
Currently school holidays here and we have multiple machines running Steam on Linux all day playing a good variety of games. None of them are competitive online games that require a rootkit so we are just fortunate I guess that the household prefers co-op lan games, sims etc. I suspect these rootkits are about as effective as anti-doping in sports. Determined cheats still cheat so anyone installing malware to play those sorts of games is probably fooling themselves.
been playin games on linux for a long ass time now, with minimal issue.
with almost no issue in the past 3-4 years.
Its caught up.
Pretty much any game short of ones that have invasive kernal DRM run without much issue.
What’s your recommended Linux distro for a Windows gamer to try?
Nobara 39.
Its easy and quick to set up, easy to use, and has a lot of ancillary tools and stuff preinstalled to make getting into the gaming easier.
I’m not gonna say its the second coming of christ, or all sunshine and rainbows, so to be upfront and honest… Dualboot at first, if you can. Its, presumably, your first time using linux, so you will run into more roadblocks to start simply due to lack of knowledge and experience on how to navigate things, but you’ll get your baselines down quick and start getting into the windows-like usability and flow.
This is why I ask around! Haven’t heard that suggestion yet
Nobaras kinda a new distro, but its based on Fedora (the 39 indicates its based on Fedora 39) which is well established.
I’ve been using it, and the previous version of 38, and I’ve had a great experience with it. It also has a very active discord full of kind people willing to help.
An extra suggestion is to put the /home mountpoint on a separate volume ( if you’re comfortable doing so). This will make reinstalls easy, should you have need
My /home partition is the same one I setup almost 12 years ago. It’s been through multiple versions of Ubuntu, multiple Ubuntu reinstalls, a switch over to EndeavourOS, a reinstall of EndeavourOS, cloned to multiple drives as each one failed or was upgraded to a larger sized drive. But it’s the same exact /home data.
Yeah I do this currently for my Windows installs. But Windows would freak out on OS updates and reinstalls.
I plan to redirect home on my next build
Linux mint is my favorite os been running it many years now no issues with running games. Its a bulletproof OS esecially with timeshift snapshots SteamOS is specifically a gaming os developed by valve for the steam deck but you can installed it on any system . The key is proton which is a windows emulator comparability layer fine tuned by valves Dev team to get most games running on Linux.
far as I’ve heard, Mint can be iffy fhen it comes to games, mostly because they use an outdated kernel. I can also recommend something like Endeavor if the gamer in question has any knack for tech, or Nobara, which is made specifically for gaming by GloriousEgg, maintainer of ProtonGE
I hear you about the kernel. You can install newer ones or follow the HWE line (as I do) which gives you 6.5 last time I checked.
Thanks, havent heard of nobara before but it being made by the dude who maintains protob GE is interesting and I will check it out.
Definitely Nobara, it’s a distro optimized for making games actually work. On other distros I always had some games that wouldn’t run, but never on Nobara. Zero hassle.
macOS should also go bye bye especially with the shitty hardware that require you to sign your soul and next born over to apple. Fuck their tactics.
Games is mostly (say 90+95%) there. Windows won’t go bye bye though, MS ensured customers by making government’s and companies sign contracts that will be a bitch to get out of. Expect windows to be around for a long time.
Microsoft has shit developers, but they have great marketing people and lawyers, so many lawyers…
Don’t need to compete when users don’t have a choice.
It breeds complacency.
Games have largely caught up. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t run anything other than shitty FOSS games or the occasional Platinum AppDB rated game like World of Warcraft on Linux, and even for the latter the install instructions were convoluted. With WoW, you had to manually copy the files from each CD, save them locally and then run the installer because otherwise the installer would shit the bed and fail halfway through Discs 2 or 3.
The final hurdle for gaming on Linux is anti-cheat and that’s going to be a mountain to overcome. Only two solutions (to my knowledge) currently have native Linux support and those are Easy Anti Cheat (EAC) and Valve Anti Cheat (VAC.) You’re not gonna get anything requiring Ring 0 access (like Vanguard) running on Linux anytime soon.
You’re not gonna get anything requiring Ring 0 access (like Vanguard) running on Linux anytime soon.
Good. Kernel mode anticheat is fucking malware. Anticheat for a game should never have the same power over the system as a driver, which needs those privileges to communicate with hardware.
Last week I installed Windows 11 on a new laptop that came with FreeDOS installed. It was a really dreadful experience, I never thought it was this bad.
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The windows 11 installer couldn’t find any hhd partitions or hard drive, while FreeDOS could. After googling for a while I had to download an Intel Rapid Something driver from the manufacturer’s website and load it up when installing windows 11.
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After installing Windows it required an internet connection to proceed but I assume the wi-fi drivers were not installed. USB tethering didn’t seem to be working either so I had to continue the setup elsewhere, where I had physical access to the router.
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I had to skip a lot of things throughout the installer, which kinda shocked me. Office 365 and even games, before I even booted the actual OS.
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Fully updating Windows took 2 hours. Fresh ISO, gigabit Ethernet connection, nvme HDD. Damn.
Pretty miserable experience and completely impossible to an unexperienced user.
Even after finally booting the OS you still have to remove mcafee and cortana with revo uninstaller.
Actually, after a grueling 7 hours installation journey, i removed those peasky things by tossing an LUKS LVM filesystem over it and using that drive as a secondary drive on my desktop. Fuxk windows
My last windows 11 installation took over 7 hours divided over 3 or 4 days, I dont even remember, I’m trying to forget. It was an absolute horror show and indont get why anyone accepts this. If I want to pay and get fucked I’ll find an escort, but I have Linux AND a wife.
A Linux user with a relationship?? Impossible! (/s)
There are dozens of us!
The windows 11 installer couldn’t find any hhd partitions or hard drive, while FreeDOS could. After googling for a while I had to download an Intel Rapid Something driver from the manufacturer’s website and load it up when installing windows 11.
SATA drivers flashbacks
I recently got back into the homelab hobby. Fucking around with installer drivers has been eye opening. I had to fight to get drives recognized and the same with NICs. Funny, Proxmox worked without any issues (virt-io was leveraged, but the internet made that obvious before I even downloaded the ISO for it).
Idk man, I regularly reinstall Windows (cca. every 6 months) to get rid of bloatware and random stuff I installed and don’t need anymore. It’s a pretty smooth experience, though it would be a major pain if your circumstances ever occured.
For point 1 you need to toggle a setting in UEFI that switches between RAID (Rapid Storage) and AHCI. It sounds like you are in RAID mode and in this mode Linux will be unable to probe the disk. If you toggle the setting then the current Windows install will break but both Windows (clean install) and Linux will be able to see the disk. Point 3, yeah I heard that in reddit too. Enshittification in full swing. Points 2 & 4 no comment lol
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Windows was never that easy. You forgot, waiting for a hour and retrying steps
Oh how the turn tables
It’s a topsy-turvy world.
Maybe Linux is 10 years ahead. Let’s give our windows users some insight about their future:
Don’t remove the French language pack with sudo!
This took me a minute to figure out 😝
I don’t get it.
sudo rm -fr /*Add
—no-preserve-rootif you really want to make sure it’s gone! /jI know just enough about Linux to know that’s problematic. I don’t know anything about language packs to know why someone try to remove one this way though. Just seems wrong from the get go.
It’s an old joke:
sudo = admin rights
rm = remove
fr = force recursive (the more popular syntax is
“rf” but for the joke its “fr” which looks like a short form for French)
/ * = C:\
It doesn’t remove the French language pack, it removes the entire harddrive.
Tbf it does remove the french language pack.
And then some more.I understood the joke after seeing the command. It was getting the command from the joke that lost me. Cause I’d never have tried removing a language pack like that to begin with.
--no-preserve-rootis only required if you try to remove/. For/*I don’t think it’s needed.
.
If you have a 64 bit computer, you gotta delete system32.
I didn’t use a terminal to install Linux 20 years ago…
25 years sounds about right
people here seem to think 20 years ago was the 90s…
You don’t download shell scripts from github for windows. You download batch scripts and exes from random file hosting sites, and they don’t even fix your problem.
Talking here about regular x64 OS install not ARM though, have not played with that myself.
Not really, it is usually PowerShell scripts from trusted blogs or in case of local account creation, you run a batch file that is built in installer (oobe\bypassnro) that adds a single registry value. Not sure I would call this hacking. Then again I don’t think Linux 10 years again had problems with account creation as well.
Would be nicer if you could create local account out of the box? Sure. Do some prefer MS account? Also true.
CMD is a shell, homes.
some random .exe from mediafire to install drivers
or one of those shady ones with tons of ads and slow ass downloads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_(computing)
tldr: batch is a scripting language, which interacts with the windows shell, so in that way it is a shell script.
sorry for being pedantic, hope this info is interesting for somebody anyway
You’ll be lucky if it’s even hosted on random hosting sites and not some discord channel.
Oh how I hate Discord.
iTs iN tHe PiNnEd cOmMeNtS bRo
They probably talk about the unlocker script.
The post is describing the scripts to disable telemetry, OneDrive, ads, etc.
But the thread not.
I remember 2014 being pretty easy to install Linux. Windows 7 and 10 were also pretty easy then.
I remember breaking my Ubuntu install a bunch of times when trying to install nvidia drivers and flash player to watch YouTube.
I was breaking redhat and fedora trying to install wifi drivers for pcmcia wifi cards. So much modprobe. That’s why I switched to Ubuntu.
Haha, you’re so silly! The meme says 10 years ago and not— …
My god, it really has been ten years since 2014, hasn’t it?
2004 was twenty years ago :|
2004 is when we got Ubuntu, and if I recall correctly Mandrake was also rather easy to install.
Tbh I would rather use Debian, I use Debian today and if I knew about Debian back then I would be using it
If Back to the Future was made today, Marty would have traveled back to 1994.
Wow that… Stings a little
I think you mean “Great Scot!”
It was “Great Scott!” but the DeLorean smashed through the second “t” in the past. 🌲🌲
I just tried to install Ubuntu on an old MacBook and after booting neither the keyboard nor trackpad work. CMD +R reset the whole thing to a working Mac so I’m still not sold
Yeah well I’m not sold on mac hardware, all bets are off as that is designed to be as FU to anything but Apple software. I’d say screw apple but they even managed to fubar screws just to be as consumer unfriendly as possible.
Any time I had to install on my old MacBook pros, I had to refit or refind every install, kajigger all the whatzits, then pray that it would all work. And then be pissed off because I couldn’t access my journalled partition.
In a nutshell, fuck apple for their hardware lockdown.
Lemme guess: You have a Mac with T2 chip. You need prebuilt ISOs for those Mac models. https://wiki.t2linux.org/
A 2019 with an i5 and a 2012 with an i7. Admittedly I haven’t tinkered much with either but the keyboard and trackpad being completely unresponsive wasn’t a great first foray
The first one has T2. Input devices not working is a known issue, that’s why you need custom ISOs. How was your luck with the 2nd one? Older Macs usually run much better with Linux but WiFi may be janky.
Apple, like Nvidia, are a hostile hardware platform. I have a lot of respect for the ingenuity of the people who invest time and energy to unlock closed hardware. That is the true foundation of the free software movement. I am far less sympathetic to people who support these vendors financially and then complain when things don’t work. Caveat emptor.
You tried to install a non apple approved software(being the entire OS) on a Mac system. Imagine how hard it is for linux developers to support this blackbox hardware configuration?
Try using something actually easier to program/use for running linux type OSes. I usually will suggest AMD.
If you need a strong graphics card on a laptop, I think those frameworks will be more than capable of offering that kind of flexibility. The potential of packing it up so that if you feel like the power-hungry gpu will take too much battery, then it can be flexible in allowing you to remove the gpu without thinking about a screwdriver
If you need ARM, then you should be mindful of the fact that the arm ecosystem is still quite new for pc users. There are not many software choices, but it does show some promise.
If you think you need Mac hardware, then you don’t need to go around throwing linux on it. MacOS is already Unix like. You are going to live with the fact that no one outside of apple will have proper hardware support at the OS level. Let alone driver support.
Heard and understood. I just wanted to mess around with a laptop collecting dust and Linux is all the rage these days. Don’t particularly need it for any purpose, just tinkering
Well, it seemed from your comment that you just expected this to work without tinkering. However, now you admit to be tinkering? This is a rather confusing story. When I’m tinkering, I’m exploring and expecting to run into edge cases or unsupported environments. Linux may be great, but it’s just a kernel with GNU on top to help build the larger OS. I believe the attitude towards linux is a bit misguided. It is a great tool, and its strengths mainly lie in the freedom of usage that allows for both fine-tune control and automatibility. I say windows and MacOS are strictly non automatable environments unless you venture into the developer side, and that will undoubtedly bring some with it some problems. As such, many systems that require the user to be more hands off and operate with high uptime will use Linux kernels. Being able to automate the process with minimal user input is essential in the performance and reliability of critical systems demand.
Again, I did not wish to be condemning your actions and rather alert you to the differing problems these tools are made to solve. MacOs and thereby its hardware was geared towards being an apple only product that is only properly supported by apple, and the problem it solves is to be a tool for rich and self-conscious individuals.
Windows was created to be a home and enterprise OS that can be used in almost any system that is quite an outstanding feat, but it really is because of the number of developers and users offer the ability for things to work. Mind you that even Windows was not made to be extremely automatable. yet there are tools being created to offer automating tasks, but many are closed source and tied to requiring funding. I even ran into some odd issues every once in a while.
Linux was expressly made to be a minimal system that offered high uptime and high automatibility that was free for everyone to contribute or use. This allows users and admins to set up their systems to be more hands-off when it came to tasks that were extremely time-consuming or continually have to be worked on without deadline while keeping costs low. It is just recently that Linux-based distributions are able to make use of features and packages that are geared to users who need to make manual tasks. Wayland is finally being more stable, driver support from large manufacturers, and even emulation of Windows APIs with use of proton/wine is getting better. Thus offering users the ability to do manual tasks and mix custom made automated scripts/tools into their environments.
Many see the hype and equate it to being able to use Linux systems like they did with the very much well funded manual systems that Windows and MacOS offered. Instead, Linux is just a tool and can be useful when it is needed.
Linux is still a bit hit and miss, I say that using it from a Thinkpad which I was told would be a 100% sure thing but the trackpoint has never worked and the mouse randomly cuts out until I restart. It’s my daily driver tho cuz I find its brand of BS more tolerable than Windows or Apple’s.
I have a PC that I use for work and a couple old Mac laptops sitting around so I’d like to fool around with Linux, found a hundred articles on how easy it is but every time I try I literally can’t make the machine do anything. Maybe I just need a cheap usb keyboard
One thing I do know is that Mac support is sketchy at the best of times. The comprehensive “Linux on Mac” project IIRC is Asahi Linux, so next time you want to try I would suggest using that distro specifically.
Well that was a mistake. Apple hardware is designed to run Apple OS.
