At this point I feel like Linux may be more likely to just work than a windows machine. I just had the unfortunate experience of setting up windows 11, and the number of ‘please wait while we get things ready for you’ was truly astonishing.
Will it always be flawless? No. Will it always work perfectly out of the box? No. But it will work and generally you have a good chance of it working as you wish assuming you are fine with Windows and what MS does with it.
I bought an Asus Zephyrus G15 (2022) specifically because it was recommended to me because it is supposed to be great for Linux and it's probably the worst Linux experience I have ever had. As the first piece of hardware that I specifically picked for Linux support.
Because most DEs don't do fractional scaling but all high end laptops have too much DPI to not have fractional scaling.
Nvidia is still not providing proper Linux drivers.
Asus can't program to save their lives but the tools that replace the Asus stuff on Windows are still better than the stuff that is replacing the Asus stuff on Linux (asusctl/ supergfxctl vs G-Helper).
I once had a machine where the nvme drive was simply not working. That was when Kernel 5 came out. It broke on Fedora but worked in Mint until Mint got Kernel 5.
During my last Linux adventure, KDE just died when using WhatsApp as a PWA (where I live, WhatsApp is essential software to have a social life).
And even after years of Wayland being around, it's still impossible to have apps that aren't blurry in most DEs because X11 is still around.
You're complaining about software updates and user friendly loading screens. The issues that drive people away from Linux and to Windows are literally unfixable to 99% of the techies that try Linux. I'm not fixing an nvme driver in the Kernel. That's not my area of expertise. But I still need my machine to work and on Windows, it does.
Rufus let's you create an ISO that skips most of the windows 11 nonsense btw.
I’ve had literally zero of any of those issues in my past 4 years of using Ubuntu.
I had a hell of a lot in the past, so I trust I can judge when it’s reached “better than windows” level.
Today, it's even made worse by the fact that MS is intentionally driving Windows UX to the ground in exchange for short term profits. Installing Windows isn't "clicking a few things." It's going out of your way to disable piles upon piles of anti-features MS throws at you, whether it be spyware, bloatware, or the hyper-aggressive nags to get you work against your will. The length die-hard Windows users go to to "de-bloatify" their Windows installation these days is absurd.
It's true that Windows had a superior end user UX over Linux 2 decades ago. But that has changed with improvements on the Linux side and poor, poor decisions on behalf of MS.
1. Set up USB stick in Rufus with all the setup skips enabled 2. Select install options, skip key, next next next 3. Wait for it to install 4. Say no to MS account, put in username, password, and security questions 5. Wait for a reboot and setup 6. Connect to internet, run Windows update, reboot when done 7. Uninstall the few bloatware apps in the start menu, most of them are UWP so the uninstall button does it immediately, takes no more than 5 minutes 8. Disable web search from group policy 9. Install Windows Terminal, Powertoys, and another web browser.
I could easily automate steps 7, 8, and 9 through powershell and winget if I wanted to. The total install time was less than 10 minutes plus the time it took for Windows Updates to install and I have a pretty clean environment.
In comparison, with Fedora running on Gnome I'd have to spend a solid amount of time messing with dconf settings to get fractional scaling to show up and for my touchpad to scroll at the correct speed + installing extensions to get a UX as good as Powertoys has by default, and on KDE I would need to spend the same amount of time messing with settings and installing KWin scripts to get functional tiling (although that might have got better since I last tried it).
Oh and on MacOS I would be up and running in almost no time, because there's no way to fix the absolute dumpsterfire of a UX it has so I don't even bother.
So all options kinda suck, Windows just sucks in its own ways.
You having that experience does not make it a basic fact.
I didn’t even have to do the actual installation, as it was a prebuild machine. The only thing I had to do was the ‘clicking a few things and typing out username and password’ part.
Comparing the two between Ubuntu and Windows, I’m forced to conclude that Ubuntu has the easier version, or at least faster. And windows has the advantage/disadvantage of needing my MS account to set up an operating system.
It is that simple with Ubuntu and similar distros. It has been that simple for many years.
Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Elementary OS and I guess a few others will beg to differ. And it takes way less than 8 minutes.
Am I missing something?
(And the same applies to UEFI capable Linux-distros)
That’s true. I forgot!
While it’s not part of the UEFI spec many (most?) consumer BIOSes will be able to UEFI boot from NTFS as well, so formatting as that might also be an option.
Both that and exfat should be easy to do on Linux. No idea about MacOS.
Which brings me to
> too large for most tools to understand
This I don’t understand. What tools? What tools do you need beside “cp”?
There’s dozens of guides on doing this on a Mac, they all seem outdated. I found a tool called WinDiskWriter on GitHub and it was the only GUI tool that worked.
Suspect there’s more to it than just cp. There’s wimlib too for handling the larger files on the install ISO.
That’s for legacy MBR boot. It has no function with UEFI boot.
Same for Windows as it is for Linux.
UEFI usually boots straight into native long mode without any weird 8086 compatibility modes being employed (which the OS then has to unroll), so for the OS its simpler to deal with.
It can also serve as a multi-boot menu on machines which has several OSes installed.
It often comes with a MS-DOS like "UEFI Shell" you can boot into... To manage UEFI itself. So if something doesn't boot, you can just boot into the shell instead and try to fix things from there.
It may sound complex, but once you get into it, its really much easier to work with that legacy MBR boot, and all the "magic" things you have to do their to get things booting.
I definitely recommend reading up on it.