I found repartitioning the harddrive by far the biggest hurdle. That’s a complicated and scary process that can delete all your data if you hit the wrong button. Picking the right partition sizes is another problem, as the Windows default EFI partition for example is far too small to be used with distributions that put their kernel on there (e.g. NixOS), but there is nothing warning you about that and resizing it, is complicated since there is a Windows partition in the way. The solution already existed in the form of Wubi, which made your whole Linux installation a file on your Windows partition, but that got sadly abandoned.
Next biggest problem is the boot manager, they still suck and are far to brittle. I’d wish we got rid of boot managers as is, and instead just booted into a mini-Linux has boot manager, that could not only be used to fix bad boot configuration, but also used as full recovery system. Having a full OS as boot manager means you can update and change the whole OS without fumbling with USB sticks and stuff, you can even update or switch distributions remotely. It’s an extremely powerful setup, that as far as I know, none of the popular distributions uses.
Finally, just having stuff work. My amdgpu driver still crashes regularly. There is always some obscure crap I have to configure to make things work. And I regularly have to search the Internet to find solutions for my problems. Can we have some (opt-in) Telemetry here? A tool that can scan my hardware and error logs, tell me what I have and tell me if it works in Linux or direct me to an bug tracker with workarounds? ProtonDB for hardware, kind of. Why do I still have to do that manually?
Another big hurdle of course is just the software, even if everything runs perfectly on the Linux side, moving all your software over is always a big hurdle. Wine/Proton helps a lot, but still fiddle for stuff outside of Steam. Not really seeing any easy solution here. Something like Xen installed by default that lets you switch OSs without dual booting might work, or a VM that can boot into your actual Windows partition, but no idea if that would work well enough to solve more problems than it creates.
All that aside, the problems for new users are a bit overrated. Installing Linux is something you do once or twice, that process of course needs to work well enough to function, but it’s far more important that the OS works well once you are past that point. If the OS fails in daily use, that’s when people abandon it. Enduring a shitty installer for a weekend is not really that big of a deal in the bigger picture, if the OS you’ll end up with is actually worth it.
Little aside: Why the f’ is ‘parted’ not the command line version of ‘gparted’? As far as I know, there is no command line tool left that allows you to move and resize partitions via command line in a single UI. That functionality was ripped out of ‘parted’ years ago, so you are stuck with manually fdisk, ext2resize, etc. which is not fun at all, since they all take sizes in different units and have different UI.
Installing Linux is not a user problem. Most users wouldn’t be able to install windows. You will never have users easily partition a computer, especially if you want to keep data. Even most people working with computers wouldn’t be able to that!
You’re gravely misunderstanding what users need. If a computer is pre-installed and working, 90% of the problems are solved already. The actual problems are 1) to not break the system with an update, and this on two computers I updated once a year it didn’t happen for 5 years ; 2) have the softwares working
is the big part : people will moan about not having office, but office365 is a thing and you can tell them to deal with it. Video games are the next big part, and with proton it’s almost as smooth as it could get
If a computer is pre-installed and working, 90% of the problems are solved already.
That’s a fantasy solution to a real world problem. Computers will never come with Linux preinstalled in large numbers. Even if they did, they’d come with a shitty distribution filled with adware that you’d want to reinstall anyway.
Installation of Linux on an already existing Windows system is an important problem that needs solving, and it feels like we barely made any progress there in 20 years (anybody remember umsdos?).
You hit the nail on the head about telemetry. Every program that asks me to share crash reports I always turn it on. That’s just too useful for them to worry about some ideological puritanism about “privacy”.
The problem with telemetry is that it often happens in secret. You can never tell what it’s collecting and when it is sending it. When it happens in the open, than it can be great. Steam Hardware Surveys are a great example of this, you can see exactly what it sends and when, you can opt-out of it before it sends anything and you even get to look at the results of the survey.
That’s the kind of thing I’d love to have for Linux. Couple that with what errors are showing up in the kernel logs, what software versions people are running, and it would make it much easier to chose the right hardware for Linux.
I found repartitioning the harddrive by far the biggest hurdle. That’s a complicated and scary process that can delete all your data if you hit the wrong button. Picking the right partition sizes is another problem, as the Windows default EFI partition for example is far too small to be used with distributions that put their kernel on there (e.g. NixOS), but there is nothing warning you about that and resizing it, is complicated since there is a Windows partition in the way. The solution already existed in the form of Wubi, which made your whole Linux installation a file on your Windows partition, but that got sadly abandoned.
Next biggest problem is the boot manager, they still suck and are far to brittle. I’d wish we got rid of boot managers as is, and instead just booted into a mini-Linux has boot manager, that could not only be used to fix bad boot configuration, but also used as full recovery system. Having a full OS as boot manager means you can update and change the whole OS without fumbling with USB sticks and stuff, you can even update or switch distributions remotely. It’s an extremely powerful setup, that as far as I know, none of the popular distributions uses.
Finally, just having stuff work. My amdgpu driver still crashes regularly. There is always some obscure crap I have to configure to make things work. And I regularly have to search the Internet to find solutions for my problems. Can we have some (opt-in) Telemetry here? A tool that can scan my hardware and error logs, tell me what I have and tell me if it works in Linux or direct me to an bug tracker with workarounds? ProtonDB for hardware, kind of. Why do I still have to do that manually?
Another big hurdle of course is just the software, even if everything runs perfectly on the Linux side, moving all your software over is always a big hurdle. Wine/Proton helps a lot, but still fiddle for stuff outside of Steam. Not really seeing any easy solution here. Something like Xen installed by default that lets you switch OSs without dual booting might work, or a VM that can boot into your actual Windows partition, but no idea if that would work well enough to solve more problems than it creates.
All that aside, the problems for new users are a bit overrated. Installing Linux is something you do once or twice, that process of course needs to work well enough to function, but it’s far more important that the OS works well once you are past that point. If the OS fails in daily use, that’s when people abandon it. Enduring a shitty installer for a weekend is not really that big of a deal in the bigger picture, if the OS you’ll end up with is actually worth it.
Little aside: Why the f’ is ‘parted’ not the command line version of ‘gparted’? As far as I know, there is no command line tool left that allows you to move and resize partitions via command line in a single UI. That functionality was ripped out of ‘parted’ years ago, so you are stuck with manually fdisk, ext2resize, etc. which is not fun at all, since they all take sizes in different units and have different UI.
Installing Linux is not a user problem. Most users wouldn’t be able to install windows. You will never have users easily partition a computer, especially if you want to keep data. Even most people working with computers wouldn’t be able to that!
You’re gravely misunderstanding what users need. If a computer is pre-installed and working, 90% of the problems are solved already. The actual problems are 1) to not break the system with an update, and this on two computers I updated once a year it didn’t happen for 5 years ; 2) have the softwares working
That’s a fantasy solution to a real world problem. Computers will never come with Linux preinstalled in large numbers. Even if they did, they’d come with a shitty distribution filled with adware that you’d want to reinstall anyway.
Installation of Linux on an already existing Windows system is an important problem that needs solving, and it feels like we barely made any progress there in 20 years (anybody remember umsdos?).
@lloram239
That ‘partitioning’ part is absolutely 100% correct😔😔😔 it’s scary for general users !
@fugepe
It’s tough for advanced users like me because I hardly ever need to do it. It’s not a routine task.
One of the few things I genuinely preper a GUI for because I feel I’m much less likely to make a fat-finger mistake.
You hit the nail on the head about telemetry. Every program that asks me to share crash reports I always turn it on. That’s just too useful for them to worry about some ideological puritanism about “privacy”.
The problem with telemetry is that it often happens in secret. You can never tell what it’s collecting and when it is sending it. When it happens in the open, than it can be great. Steam Hardware Surveys are a great example of this, you can see exactly what it sends and when, you can opt-out of it before it sends anything and you even get to look at the results of the survey.
That’s the kind of thing I’d love to have for Linux. Couple that with what errors are showing up in the kernel logs, what software versions people are running, and it would make it much easier to chose the right hardware for Linux.