"Confidently install Linux"
You mean pop in a USB pen and click install?
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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There's a lot more to it than that. Which ISO do you download? How do you make the USB installable. What to do if the USB doesn't boot when you restart the computer. Do you want to manually partition things? What the hell's a partition?
There's installing Linux, then there's confidently installing Linux.
ISO? USB? What kind of amateur hour is this?
I just have a BOOTP server running on my LAN that allows me to netboot any x86 machine straight into the Debian installer.
Interesting. How do you host that?
I use dnsmasq on my router (I use a small server-grade PC as a router). It’s both a DHCP server as well as a caching DNS. Next to that it also runs a TFTP server. TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) is a standard for simple file transfers mainly used for network booting.
If you tell a machine to boot from the network, it will basically request an IP through DHCP and with that DHCP response comes a list of available network boot options. Each option is contains the name of a file it can load from the TFTP server. If you select one of the options, it will download that file and execute it. That file will usually be a bootloader (like Grub) which will then take over the boot process.
I have set up a bunch of different network boot options, including a Debian installer, a small Linux rescue system and Memtest86+ . That way I can always network-boot any machine on my LAN to either install an OS or diagnose problems.
I fell asleep halfway through your comment
Yeah, we really need to stop taking about it as if it is difficult.
I think most folk's apprehension comes not from the difficulty but because a certain type of person wants people to think that it is difficult.
Most teachers (the ones educating the youth on tech!) can't figure out how to play a YouTube video. Hell they can't figure out how to take a photo on a phone or send a text. Installing Linux is difficult for the average person. The average tech savvy person, it's easy. Related xkcd as always,
It is difficult for a huge portion of the population. Hell man, my neighbor came over the other day and asked me if I know how to copy stuff to a USB drive. He's about my age, so it's not like he's ancient or anything, he just doesn't know anything about computers like most people these days.
There's "difficult" in the sense of a person's reasonable ability to follow rather straightforward prompts, even if they don't know what they mean. Linux installers are rather low difficulty here.
Then there's "difficult" in the sense of how much a typical person will tolerate being rushed through a bunch of mystifying questions just to get through to the other side, particularly when an alternative option that doesn't ask them at all is available. Linux is atrocious in that regard.
Really hot take: more choice is actively bad for people who don't care. Which is far and away most of them. The kind of personality matrix that is attracted to Linux as-is tends to be the kind that wants everything configurable, and for the system to never assume anything, and let the user roll everything themselves. Most people are not like this and they don't appreciate this "courtesy". Giving them the option at all is the deterrent.
If you want to talk Linux installers that are on-par with the UX feel experience provided by macOS or Windows from a normie's perspective, show me one that doesn't ask anything of the user that doesn't also appear in one of those installers. Not a single thing. If it does, that's a speed bump that has no reason to be there. Because the person who is using it likely doesn't have the answer, and if the correct course of action in that situation is, "It doesn't matter, just use the default", then why did it even ask? It should just do it.
I'm not suggesting we need to completely rob all installers of any choice, either. We can have a two-tier system, so people who actually know the answers to those questions can select the advanced install, and people who don't care can select the streamlined install.
The dirty little secret about the mass market aversion to Linux is that people are genuinely not interested in or remotely curious about the inner workings of their computers. Those of us who like to immerse ourselves in it for fun are outliers. Any one of us who denies it has their head extremely far up their ass.
It's similar to car mechanics. The vast majority of drivers don't know or care how the machine works, they just want it to get them where they want to go. If it breaks, take it to the nerd who gives a shit. The more fiberglass cowls and covers you slap on top to hide the inner workings of the thing and automatic features you implement to abstract it all away from the user, the better, from their perspective. The damn car should just go. How it goes is not of any concern.
Linux needs to offer a similar experience if it wants mass market appeal any time soon. The alternative, trying to actually spark that curiosity in people to enjoy understanding how the machine works, is far too slow of a process to make any measurable movement of the needle of user adoption over time. Low barrier to entry isn't good enough when zero barrier to entry exists and is already the standard.
It's not just that they may not care. They may not know what they're being asked or know what the consequences are for choosing either option. Then they sit there for 30 minutes searching the internet for what the question means.
honest question: have you ever tried to fresh install windows on a pc or laptop that didn't have an OS (or a previous windows) installed? I found it way more unintuitive than for example kubuntu installer in the past years.
have you ever tried to fresh install windows on a pc or laptop that didn’t have an OS
Thing is, most non-Linux users didn't install their OS: It came with the machine.
Unfortunately, most have never installed an OS and so have no frame of reference of how difficult it should be. The majority just turn on the machine and the OS is already there, so for them, anything more complicated than that is already harder than what they expect.
Also, hardware compatibility. There is no easy way to know how compatible a given machine is. If the common user installs Linux and runs into compatibility problems immediately, then that will make them think Windows is better, because it doesn't have those issues.
For Linux to reach mass adoption it needs to come pre-installed on machines or else it's just too much to ask from the masses. Also, never underestimate tech illiteracy.
It is true that Windows is harder to install than Linux, but most don't install Windows: It came with the machine.
I haven't. I suppose that's a large chunk of where the advantage comes from, isn't it? New computers are expected to just come with the OS on them already. The entire process of installing an OS no matter whose you use is a completely alien concept to most people, and anyone who thinks it's "not that hard for the average person" is daft.
Are OEM Linux installs even a thing? For like, ""real"" hardware, from ""real"" (read: mainstream enough to buy on a shelf at Best Buy) manufacturers? Those are what we need to be steering people to, IMO, if we ever want Linux to be competitive with Windows and macOS for an average person.
System76 sells OEM Linux computers, but they don't sell them in Best Buy, to my knowledge.
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Yes but also if I told my wife to try "install Linux", she'd be lost before finding out where to start. Not that she's dumb, but because she has no practical knowledge (or any interest to learn) to do anything outside her browser or few apps there that she needs or wants. If there's something that needs to be done on the computer, she asks me because it's my area of expertise.
But on the other hand, I'm not thinking for a shit about medical questions. As a medical doctor she can answer my stupid questions on that topic.
For some tinkerer yeah sure it's easy as pie
Whoosh.
95% of people can't figure out "what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability."
Most of your comment is about changing os in general and not Linux particularly. It's certainly a factor but you have to admit some of them like Mint is dead easy for anyone who can out some effort. Download Linux Mint, install a burner like Rufus, select iso and click burn, boot into it from BIOS and just clock threw most of them with default settings which is good enough for someone who is not tech savvy. The only time I had trouble installing Linux was with nixos GUI installer which had a broken setting but never had any issues with Mint, fedora or Debian.
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Step zero is "be the type of person who wants to install Linux", which is probably the key part of our demographic.
Correct. Installing Linux isn't the issue. Getting any hardware you have to actually function properly and fully, along with learning new software for your needs that can at times have less functionality and user friendliness, is the difficulty with Linux.
The lack of consumer software is the real big issue yet to be solved. We're getting gaming sorted, finally, but that's required the biggest game distributor in the world (valve) to basically take the project over completely to get there. We just haven't gotten to the point that enterprise environments will start switching desktops over to linux, because the network management and production tools just aren't there yet. Hopefully we will be there soon, the pace of adoption is really picking up especially with win10 EOL, but until then there's some real hard work to be done before the "linux best" memes stop being wishful thinking.
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Yeah, so you're in that group then
Still too scawy for some! :-P
I think this counts as confident.
That is not the proper way to install Arch, BTW.
It's not about difficulty, it's about confidence! These are users who have conquered their fears. A fearless community of news, politics, and memes!
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I thought people on Lemmy would understand the pun of my nickname, but instead people assume I'm an asshole just based on my name being "go fuck yourself" to them.
I even tried adding $ to help make it more obvious it's not "fuck" but "fsck". Clearly, if you've never heard of fsck you're going to assume it's just some intentional misspelling of "fuck".
I regret my username now.
It’s a good pun and you shouldn’t regret it! People who don’t get the joke are unobservant and can either realize and learn from their ignorance, or remain in the dark.
I've long assumed the authors of fsck were having some childish fun in choosing the name. Personally, I'd be fine with people routinely making asses of themselves by jumping to conclusions, and acting upon them. I'd even give them a chance to save themselves from embarrassment by putting an explanation in my profile "for those unaware."
I only new fish, the shell, many people might be in the same situation
fsck is a command for "file system check" to check for drive errors.
Today I learned!
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I went from not owning a proper computer for nearly a decade (just my phone and Xbox, literally nothing else) to buying a used Thinkpad off of eBay, upgrading some parts, and installing Linux mint onto it in under a year. Now I'm looking at building a Linux gaming PC. Y'all indoctrinated me
Linux PCs are... for lack of a better word, Swiss army knives for computing.
Need a media center? We got you.
Need server software? Bro. Who are you even asking?
Need a desktop? We got you.
Need to open that hard drive? The app is in the repository for absolutely free, just works and the hard drive opens.
Corrupted?
No prob, fam, here's a suite of recovery tools. We'll get those photos of gran-gran back no prob.
Need to burn that disk? The app is in the repository for absolutely free, just works and you're burning a disk for the family.
It just never ends. With Windows I always felt like I had to play "dodge the scam" with literally everything, even shit as mundane as ninite has that sense of "well, are they spying? Is everyone?"
Installing Linux isn't hard if you use a beginner friendly distro. It's way easier than installing Windows even. However, most people haven't installed any OS themselves and use just whatever their system came with, including all the bloat and spyware included by the manufacturer
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Can I install Linux? Yes. Can I do it confidently? Nope.
I can do it in an alarmingly gung-ho manner.
I'm led to believe there may also be porn lurking somewhere.
Honestly, for me, the fediverse's weakest point is sports which is a bummer because that's where the majority of my social media engagement is. Sports weren't even mentioned in that meme 😅.
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Jokes on you, I can't confidentially do anything!
Linux is easy to install. Getting to run just the way you want it to is hard. But once you get it to run the way you want it to, using it is easy.
Fedora makes me feel more confident with Linux than where I know my skill level is at.
And furries.
The secret is that anybody can install Linux even if they can't do it confidently.
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