Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

But then you'd use the same method as installing other OS and people would realise installing a Linux distro is easy. Of course MS already made it much harder with secureboot and "accidentally" wiping Linux installs when you install it second.

Given the massive updates you immediately have to download, and the heavy push for only installing with an online account, there seems little reason to have anything beyond a minimal net installer on the USB stick.

Microsoft taught me to be this cynical about their motives over a few decades.

View on HN

Meh, I don't have any love for windows, but IME newish versions seem quite well-behaved regarding Linux. Sure, they'll rewrite the UEFI boot order, but once you set it back to what you want, it leaves it alone.

The one thing I absolutely hate, is the recovery partition at the end of the main C: drive. So that if you want to grow the C drive, you have to jump through some ridiculous hoops to move the recovery partition. Had they put it the other way around, it wouldn't have been 0 pain. Even with a healthy dose of cynicism, I really don't know what purpose this could serve.

It's legacy of the hard drives, you really want $MFT as close to the start of the disk as you can.

It's configurable through MDT.

Gparted moves it with ease.

A friend of mine recently installed windows to another drive (I hadn't had the chance to tell him to unplug every other drive) and sure enough, it did install with all of the funny partitions elsewhere. We though it will be easily fixable afterwards, but it's not - you cannot recreate it. With those gone the system cannot hibernate and it couldn't shut down until disabling fast startup. Updates don't work either, but it still tries doing them, fails rollbacks and restarts. Is it user error? Maybe, but I still blame the installer for not being clear and automatically picking a stupid setup.

I made the same mistake recently, Windows now uses the EFI partition on the Linux drive. But I don't have any of the problems listed. Not shutting down seems more like some ACPI issue to me.

My only problem is that BIOS updates delete the systemd-boot efistub, probably caused by the vendor only having exceptions for the Windows bootloader and GRUB.

I've had windows break my truecrypt disc. And this was recently.

Installed W10, after Fedora - Windows does a scanning and repairing drive and destroys a 1.5TB 60k hours drive with a full truecrypt disc encryption unrecoverable with the backed up TC headers. Annoying but not the end of the world. I've had issues with Windows installs in the past not knowing the file system on a drive and just using it. A reason which made me paranoid and I will always unplug drives I don't want used during a Windows install.

That only happened cause the disk appeared uninitialized to windows. Though I agree that it shouldn't touch any disks that aren't the install destination.

It's honestly behaving better than MBR since you don't need to boot a Linux liveUSB to fix the UEFI boot order. It requires some CMD commands but recovering (or heck, just installing) rEFInd is a rather painless affair compared to recovering a busted-up grub installation.

Windows 10 and 11 still breaks dual boot, had it happen with me in two different computers. Now I just have different computers with different OSes - had to get a second desk to be able to have all mounted in a way I don't need to swap computer cables.

Have you heard of KVMs?

When you for example upgrade from windows 10 to 11, if your partitions are a mess it will shrink your main C partition to make room for a recovery partition at the end

Doesn’t really justify putting it at the end on fresh installs, but I guess they put ease of future automated repartitioning first

The title says arch and I remember trying to install it once and it's just like 'connect to wifi' and dumps me at the command line.

I managed to figure it out by digging through documentation but the installation experience was extremely rough compared to every Windows version I can remember.

You think Linux usage is not more widespread because people don't know that it's easy to install?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com