EDIT: Beyond skill, just getting the external media is a substantial friction. I haven't used a thumb drive besides for Linux install media in 15 years; I'm good at computers but just finding / buying one of those things is its own roadblock.
This sort of thing used to be more common. My first exposure to Linux was before CD-Rs were ubiquitous so there was often no possibility of using external media if you downloaded Linux. Partitioning the drive and installing there was typical.
They were almost never all busy. Then in summer of '95 or so, they installed 100 Mbps Ethernet.
That was a big jump. And security was a huge afterthought at the time; many, many people shared their entire hard drive with no password. If only it had been a few years later with MP3's and affordable CD burners...
This is far from a simple solution (for the layman end-user) compared to the parent comment.
On the other hand, if someone finds that part too complicated to follow perhaps they may not be able to install Linux - or Windows for that matter - by themselves and come across other issues down the line. Ultimately replacing your OS with another one does require some minimum level of technical knowledge that you either need to have or be fine with learning during the process.
Most people don’t want “tools” — they want a magic button with no guesswork, no fear of nuking the wrong drive, and no tutorial rabbit holes.
A win32 installer that bundles the ISO, sets up the USB, and gently walks you through the transition? That’s the move.
We don’t need smarter users. We need smoother defaults.
I am almost certain something like this existed 15-20 years ago from Canonical.
- Avoid requiring the user to figure out how to get into BIOS/EFI and change boot order. Windows has APIs for manipulating EFI things, may be worth looking into that.
- Replace GRUB with something more modern like rEFInd or Clover with a nice looking theme.
For the latter point, while GRUB is technically functional, it looks scary and arcane to new users and has little resiliency to things like Windows updates mucking with boot entries. It makes for a bad first impression (“why is my computer showing hacker screens suddenly”) and when it breaks your average user doesn’t have a prayer of fixing it. Something that looks more modern and self-heals would be a big improvement.
Replace Grub with nothing. If you're not doing bootable snapshots like openSUSE, then there is virtually no benefit in a "boot loader". The linux kernel + cmdline (+other stuff like ucode or secure boot signing stuff) can easily be packed into a single bootable .efi file.
That efi file will then get an entry in your uefi boot device list just like windows already has/had. This way is better anyway, since windows will overwrite your uefi boot order with every significant update, meaning users will already need to know how to boot other os's.
If the idea is they go cold turkey full Linux, good luck with that.
if the idea is they use their UEFI firmware boot menu, you're forgetting how unintuitive that is for most users with most uefi interfaces (spam hotkey at boot, wait for slow loading uefi, navigate to subscreen with boot order, find right menu item, either reorder and save or press F-key combo to "boot once now")
If you managed to install linux then this really shouldn't be a thing to get hung up on.
The biggest sticking point is the fear of losing what they do have, but we're at the point where even their previous generation computer could be made to run Linux.
I guess I'm not surprised with how frequently "reinstall Windows" is offered as a solution, that there is now some lighter version of that. But really I was talking about obtaining/creating installation media and reinstalling from scratch.
Except of course, licenses and copy protection. That stuff is gone and you have to buy it all again, since the install-id is regenerated.
Installing Ubuntu bricked a Samsung laptop I had some years back. Never again.
What? How? I've never seen an installation break the BIOS. I'm sure it's possible, but I wonder what went wrong here.
I do think maybe it would be possible to improve the UX somewhat, what about having some app called "os changer" or some accessible user-friendly name, that shows a list of options with screenshots, short descriptions and perhaps some categorization/tagging/rating system (this one is good for gaming, this one has lots of support for old hardware, this one is user-friendly). Then if you select an option it starts to download the iso silently while it asks you to insert a usb-key, when you insert that key, it shows the contents if it's not empty along with a confirmation that it gets emptied. Hopefully after formatting the image has finished downloading, and it creates a bootable usb key from it. Possibly it could read system information to suggest a key to hold during boot, then reboot the system.
However you do it, I don't think there's any way around needing some intermediate to boot into. Come to think of it, maybe a live-distro where that intermediate basically is the eventual system seems very user friendly.
Ubuntu and Linux Mint are now recommending balenaEtcher, which is easier to use than Rufus.
For the tech, sure but for common people not so.
Why cannot Ubuntu just offer a download media creation tool like Windows does. Surely it's not that hard to couple dd with a batch gui.
Although, the `cat liveimage.iso > /dev/sdX` tip mentioned in this thread is very handy and is probably enough for me. Anything I can do without a distro specific tool is a win.
Install Ventoy on a USB flash drive. Copy the ISO - copy as in cp. That's it.
You can add as many ISOs and select which one to boot with.
Most people I know does exactly the same. Takes Rufus or similar and downloads official image from Microsoft
if you are on windows it is possible but involves ether going the hard route and downloading special tools from microsoft (the media creation utility) or the easy route and getting rufus.
on linux it is bewildering, however there are tools you can find that do it.
on openbsd(that's me, the weirdo using openbsd on the desktop) you are out of luck, I mean partially it is my fault, who even used obsd on the desktop. but when every single linux distro is "just dump this dvd image to a usb drive" and openbsd itself is "here is a usb image to dump to a drive" you have to wonder why microsoft makes it so difficult.
I ended up getting it done but after 30 minutes chewing through the linux script trying to get it to work on obsd went "this is not worth it for a task I am only going to do once" so booted a linux usb and used the script from there.
https://atkdinosaurus.wordpress.com/2023/03/24/another-way-t...
What worked for me was to try arch. With arch you basically start with nothing, and you build it up from there. It'll take a few hours reading the install process on the wiki, but it's otherwise very easy. In the end you'll have a full understanding of what is happening on your machine. When something happens you will know what program is causing it, because you installed and configured it yourself. Or at least it makes me feel like that, because nothing has ever actually broke or not worked on my current arch install that I'm using for over 8 years. My install seems to 'just work' and I can highly recommend it, even though the install process is a bit more involved.
The only problem with Arch is that it's not afraid to introduce breaking changes in their packages, so sometimes when updating, there could be some manual intervention involved. Best is to update at least once a week, and check the website once in a while.
> Take a look at a default emacs
Is that the default terminal editor on Ubuntu? I fully agree those text editors where typing doesn't enter text should never be the default. Something like nano should always be the default imo.
And I assume that he refers to that emacs is the default $EDITOR var on ubuntu? I don't know if that's true, but i think emacs is one of these editors which is seen as having very bad usability. I can't imagine that emacs is the default $EDITOR on a recent ubuntu version, but I agree with the sentiment that those kind of editors should never be the defualt.
„Running Linux in VM“ as you have put it, is miles better because it works all the time with 0 friction, driver issues, random freezes, reboots, etc.
Hardware support issues are certainly understandable, but blaming "opinionated nerds" for them is asinine. It cannot be understated how difficult it is to deal with certain OEMs.
Let's not forget that computer science and programming initially has been a field for and by expert and academics. A lot of tools are written by experts, people that were used to writing and reading long documents with instructions, are intimately familiar with their systems, and often write similar software themselves too. Nowadays that have changed of course, but the field still has a lot of these experts.
And experts in any field often forget how it feels to not be an expert, and as such assume a lot of things to be obvious and often forget to mention or explain crucial things. But you can't expect every expert in some field to also be an expert in educational psychology, that is a whole field in itself. And even then, you might not have the creativity or writing prowess to write clear and intuitive documentation and pick variable and function names.
On top of that people are free to do what they want. That they work on this stuff publicly and make it available in itself is something worth of praise. They don't suddenly have the responsibility to make stuff easy to use for people who aren't at the same level like that.
A distribution like Ubuntu is in part basically a specific collection of all these free tools and software and presets. And maybe there doesn't exist a super user-friendly alternative for every one, and there is basically no incentive for people to spend free time making these.
Even if Ubuntu specifically states to be user-friendly (i don't know if they do), there are numerous valid reasons might exist for that. It could be that the rather spend their time refining and improving a often used part of the system. Or that they see the terminal in itself as an expert tool, and they rather have non-experts use the configuration that's available through the UI.
Although it's beside the point I think it's also important to realize that it's basically inevitable that there's going to be at least some difference between the quality of software that's free and open source, versus a company that has the ability to spend, and stands to profit from it. In my opinion the free part means infinite value and trumps any gap in quality or functionality.
Still agree that nano or something similar should be the default and vi or emacs should be an option.
Take Ubuntu, for example. It’s one of the most popular and recommended distros for non-techy users, but just look at the install process: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop#1-overvi...
Let’s be honest, I don’t think most people would actually go through with that.
One idea to fix this and get more people to switch would be for Ubuntu to offer a Windows app that handles everything. It could download the ISO in the background, format the flash drive, install Ubuntu in dual boot with Windows by default, and clearly explain each step so users know how to start using Ubuntu or go back to Windows.