[ghoover1978]

I think that everyone knows that's a pretty ridiculous statement. Installing Windows 11 is basically putting in a USB stick, waiting about 8 minutes, clicking a few things and typing out your login and password. I love Linux, first started playing with it about 20 years ago now. There's not a single dist I've ever seen that is that simple. Just a basic fact, sorry.

[soraminazuki]

Now, that is a ridiculous statement. Installing Windows has never once been a smooth experience you describe. It's been long wait times, dozens of reboots, and never ending cycles of Windows Updates. Always has been for the last 20+ years.

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.

[76SlashDolphin]

You're greatly over-exaggerating how much effort it takes for a power user to set up Windows. I had to do it the other day on a Dell MiniPC (sadly couldn't use Linux since I needed HDR) and it's just the following.

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.

[hnfong]

From your comment it sounds like you affirmed GP's claims...

[Aeolun]

> There's not a single dist I've ever seen that is that simple. Just a basic fact, sorry.

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.

[xcv123]

> There's not a single dist I've ever seen that is that simple.

It is that simple with Ubuntu and similar distros. It has been that simple for many years.

[skydhash]

> Just a basic fact, sorry.

Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Elementary OS and I guess a few others will beg to differ. And it takes way less than 8 minutes.

[mattl]

As I found out this week, making the Windows 11 USB stick is far harder than it ought to be if you don’t have Windows already.

[josteink]

If you use UEFI, all you need is to copy the files from the ISO over to the USB stick.

Am I missing something?

(And the same applies to UEFI capable Linux-distros)

[mattl]

Windows installer images have some files too large for most tools to understand and also I believe the USB stick needs to be exFAT formatted too. Virtually any tool for making a USB stick would fail in various ways on macOS.

[josteink]

> Windows installer images have some files too large … I believe the USB stick needs to be exFAT formatted

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”?

[mattl]

I don’t know if you can just copy the files over. It seems you also need to make the USB stick bootable?

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.

[josteink]

> It seems you also need to make the USB stick bootable?

That’s for legacy MBR boot. It has no function with UEFI boot.

Same for Windows as it is for Linux.