[michaelmrose]

I'm guessing at some point in the distant past the distribution you were running didn't build X with the options you needed this wasn't normal 18 years ago and it certainly isn't now.

A Linux Mint install normally consists of a friendly gui installer followed by installing common software from an app store interface. It's more friendly than installing windows.

[maccard]

> It's more friendly than installing windows.

When's the last time you installed windows? I installed w10 about 3 weeks ago and I: - Plugged a USB key & Ethernet cable into my PC - clicked through a handful of GUI options - Made a coffee

And when I returned (~15 minutes, I didn't time it), it had installed windows, done the post-install reboot crap, and was ready for me to install my own software. Out of the box I had internet connectivity, power management, semi-modern graphics drivers (< 3 months old) and was ready to rock.

[michaelmrose]

I had a fresh install of windows from 6 months ago that just committed unrecoverable suicide a few weeks past after an update. The filesystem was fine but it wasn't able to boot any longer and absolutely nothing had changed save for the update.

Going through the recovery tools built into windows was pretty easy but nothing including "refreshing" the OS which is basically just a reinstall while saving your files didn't work either and ultimately I had to just start from scratch.

When I did the reinstall I decided to switch it from legacy to EUFI boot and enabled that. The installation of windows tried to get me to link my account with my imaginary microsoft account. Opting out of that is designed to be confusing. Then it tried to get me to enable invasive telemetry with promises of functionality I didn't care about. It wouldn't have worked anyway because without changing another peripherally related option in my motherboards settings menu windows consistently malfunctioned when enabling networking in a way that was not an issue under Linux. One hour later thinking I had somehow created the windows install usb with the wrong option I figured out what was wrong and finally had windows working again.

In the course of 6 months windows had to be installed twice and took over 2 hours total time and tried to trick me into tying my ability to use my own computer to their permission and giving up my privacy.

The only reason I bother to keep it around is that its still easier to game under Windows. Might as well call it XboxOS because its surely unsuitable for any other use.