#linuxVSwindows
I spent a good chunk of my Saturday installing Linux on my 2018 Dell laptop.

Shrinking partitions, turning off Fastboot, bitlocker, fast startup, flashing usb drives, fiddling with BIOS settings, GRUBbing around and looking for help on the miserable AI sloppy mess that the web has become.

#debian, #zorin, #linuxmint, in that order.

I experienced a pretty wide variety of problems, and today I'm back to win10...

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 Ich kann deine Lage gut verstehen. Ich habe selbst auch gerade versucht, mich mal wieder mit Linux zu beschäftigen. Aber das erste Kernelupdate hat die virtuelle Maschine zerschossen...

@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 I do have a friend who recently replaced windows 10 with Ubuntu and he seemed to have found it straightforward... He has been a windows user for most of his life, so not a Linux fanatic ;)

@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.

@drajt

Hm, debian got to the stage of booting just fine actually. I was thinking 'this is a breeze!'

Then the second reboot, and every second one it just froze at login, or 5 seconds after log in....

I will give it another try..

@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.

@RcrdSgrd I hope today goes better for you.
I have been running #LinuxMint successfully for years on my 2014 Asus laptop. I was slightly jealous that you got better results in #Debian , I have had that running but found that the additional under the hood features provided by #Ubuntu and Mint make things a little easier.
@RcrdSgrd have you tried grabbing a live USB of a distro and just doing the "run from USB" option to try it out? Don't need to faff with installs etc, and it will be slower than installled to the system drive, but should make compatibility testing easier.

@cricalix

I did that with Zorin and Mint, yes. Today I'm trying it with Debian!