I've been very unhinged this week. Completely nuked a decade long friendship and I've been arguing in Youtube comments about Linux for majority of the week.

I'm sick of hearing people say steamOS is arch or like arch

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 3 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Heh, there's been a lot of discourse about SteamOS this week. The one that annoyed me was the Linus video showing an incredibly convoluted way of (currently) installing SteamOS because Linux is apparently way harder than Windows to install.

Which may have been true once, but just isn't today if an influencer like Linus pointed his viewers to something like bazzite which is equivalent to a Windows install in difficulty as far as I can tell* and even with an nVidia card for me the games 99% of the time just work as if they're Windows.

*I suspect 90% of Windows gamers have probably never installed Windows either, so anything would be difficult and Linus just doesn't see that having installed it himself probably hundreds of times or more.

[–] Dave 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I've installed Windows and various Linux distributions many times, and they experience is basically the same. Write to a bootable flash drive, press a key in BIOS to boot from said drive, follow the instructions to install, remove flash drive and restart, then you land on your fully working install of Windows/Linux.

You're right, most Windows users have never installed it. It is a little technical to do. But most major linux distros have the same setup experience (I've never used arch 😲 so not sure about that one)

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, I mean setting aside non-graphical OS's (DOS, various flavours of *nix) that i've installed, i've used linux, windows & macs in the last 10 years and done the OS install on each of them and there is essentially no difference between the three that would hold back anyone who has done an install using one of them to do any of the others.

I can't accurately assess how difficult it might be for someone who has never done an install, ive been using & breaking computers since the 80s so have done it so many times that any quirks that pop up are just quirks, not deal breakers.

[–] Dave 1 points 1 week ago

For someone who can follow instructions, I think the hardest part of the process for any of them is booting from the install media. Every machine is different. On one you need to hold Del while it boots, another you need to press F2, another it's F8. Sometimes you have to go into the BIOS and other times it's a dedicated boot menu. And if you mess it up you have to turn it off and start again. It's been a long time since I've used a Mac but I feel like that was some keyboard compo you had to hold on boot.

I would say the two things you need to be someone who can do it are: Confidence (you aren't scared of irreparably breaking it), and good Google skills. The number of people with both these things I think is pretty small, even though the actual process is simple.

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