I teach my students that persistence is so important when learning computational skills... But in truth I can barely afford to have my laptop out of action for a day.

My work desktop also had to abandon Win10, and I set aside a whole day for that... But to bring it to Win11 *shudder*. That took about an hour. I know I'm not comparing like with like, but ffs..

Anyway, I'm just venting. I might give debian another try on the laptop as that got furthest, yesterday.

#linux #installLinux #Win11

@RcrdSgrd I can't help much here because most of my experiences with Linux installations have been with (i) newer hardware and (ii) installing Ubuntu which makes it fairly straightforward - and to be fair I do it on a semi-regular basis so there's a bit of muscle memory involved.

I do commiserate with the struggle though. Messing around with grub is always necessary to set the boot order, and making windows accept that we want to use another OS is a pain.

@RcrdSgrd installed stock #Debian on my ex work's #Dell Latitude. Everything worked perfectly out of the box bar the stupid Dell firmware, where I just had to tell it where to find the #GRUB bit that starts the boot sequence.

#UEFI can be a pig, but that's not Debian's fault that the standard is stupid and the companies make it hard to use.

On other systems I've done the same install and I didn't have to mess with the firmware.

@RcrdSgrd Messing around with configuring your everyday computer is stressful.

If you have the cash to spare, you might consider buying a refurbished laptop to experiment on. You can find decent business class machines (like a Dell Latitude) for pretty cheap through Amazon while ensuring you don't get stuck with a lemon.

A dedicated machine lets you bypass headaches like dual booting. Mint is usually a breeze to install under those conditions.