Would it be possible to lower barrier to entry that low?
To the point where installing some Linux distro would be as easy as installing a game on Steam or installing an application on a phone?
There is existing software for installing Linux from Windows.
For example, old WUBI for installing Ubuntu, and linixify-gui (fork of abandoned tunic) apparently does this as well.
So question is, should there be some effort put into making a modern installer of this kind? Something that even the person with the smoothest brain can use to get Linux on their PC?
Are there any existing projects that try to make this happen?
I feel like this may backfire, because people may accidentally replace their OS, get really pissed off, and start talking about how installing Linux is really dangerous and might wipe all your data, etc.
I don’t even think it could work. NT will bsod if the os drive disappears, so unless you install on a different drive or partition, the OS will die.
You could just have a UI that runs you through all the questions and prompts from Windows and then reboots and installs a new OS without any other interaction.
You could even have it ask which files/folders the user wants to transfer over so they don’t lose everything.
You can do that without Windows. What is the benefit?
It’s trivial to make a USB bootable installer.
It’s trivial for you.
The average windows user has no idea what “Rufus” is, or how to enter the bios and change the boot priority
Especialy nowadays with “features” like fast boot that removes the “press f# to access bios” prompt on startup to “speed-up the boot process”… Hell even when disabled (both OS and BIOS wide) some computers won’t ever show me the damn thing anyway.
Until a few months ago, I was a Windows user, and I had been since the 90s.
This was the method I used
https://chat.openai.com/?prompt=how+to+install+linux
Not sure why people are downvoting you. It’s a simple enough task that the risk of LLM hallucination is very low.
Suspect it is just from people who dislike AI but in my experience using it as a replacement search engine for some stackoverflow type questions is about the only useful thing I’ve gotten it to do.
Because a link like that is lazy and sarcastic, a bit like posting a lmgfy link
The intention was sarcasm, because I felt it was better than my initial response of, “What a stupid take”.
As I originally said, it’s trivial, but someone always feels the need to come in and shit on everything.
Nope. The installation menu is more complicated. We used to do it from Windows back in the day no problem.
Yes, this is something that should be taken into account when designing this software.
Set dual-boot as a default / design UI in a way that offers dual-boot as a preferred option.
And many other technical issues will probably appear that will have to be figured out.
But I think that at least even thinking about this is a good start.
Also, this reminds me of 2013, when people accidentally nuked their Windows installs with Linux because they wanted to get the Tux in Team Fortress 2 (Valve gave it to people who played Linux version of TF2).
There are reasons this hasn’t been done before.
There are a lot of things you’re not considering. You’d need to potentially re-partition a live mounted window disk(s) to create space for a Linux partition which could fail spectacularly. Or install over a running Windows system which will also fail very quickly.
Also - there are many tools that make it easy to create a live USB drive that one can boot from to get a taste of Linux in a way that is non-destructive and optionally install Linux.
WUBI did it really well. It got a lot of people on to Linux.
It has been done before despite reasons.
We used to do this all the time.
Do what?
Hmmm yeah I wasn’t thinking about a dual boot default. That could maybe work 🤔