this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 75 points 1 day ago (10 children)

Tbf installing linux is not that hard

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

At 12 i would still have been too scared of breaking something, which I think is a reasonable fear, at the very least if you're sharing a PC.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

At 12 I was too scared of downloading most programs for fear of viruses, if I had been asked to partition a drive I would have cried.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Back in the day when installing Solaris and OpenBSD and such you had to specify in numerical values the number of sectors of hard disk space you wanted to format drives with. Shit is considerably easier now with modern UNIXy systems.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Back in what day? My first Linux was in the early 2000s, and even back then it wasn't any more complicated than a Windows install.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

In the early 2000s getting things like wifi drivers working was a pain in the ass sometimes. It was definitely more difficult

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

When I installed Linux for the first time around that time frame, I had to write X configs (for XFree86, not X.org) by hand. And be sure to get your monitor timings exactly right or risk permanent damage, said the scary warning.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

That was always 'fun'. Trying to find things like the 'front porch' timings was an exercise in frustration at times. Then put it all together and try it, hoping it either worked, or at least didn't go too badly. The 'boiinng' noise sone monitors would make was always a bit alarming.

I ended up soldering together an adapter to convert from VGA to a monitor that took separate red, green and blue inputs with a sync pulse on green. Working out the timings for that was interesting, but I doubt any other PC OS could have driven it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

The mid 1990s for me, OpenBSD came out in 1996 and Solaris was Solaris was like 1992. I was admining a Solaris SPARC station back around 1997 that had a gnarly install if I remember correctly. It was on 3.5” floppies and I still have that SPARC station and the original Solaris OS sitting in the basement collecting dust. At one point that SPARC was being used by some of us working with the PHP group to diagnose file system limits on Solaris and build PHP binaries back when I was involved in PHP development. Fun times.

My first Linux install was like Red Hat 5.2 or something and it was much nicer.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

It's absolutely insane how much progress was made from 1995-2000.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Oh man. I remember Solaris. I tried to install that on something and never got it running.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Bah! Young'un! ;) Installing Slackware off of a stack of 5 1/4" floppies and trying to work out your harddrive's geometry without switching the machine off to look at the label was a challenge. Doubly so if you were trying to dual boot.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Lemmites are old brah

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

my first linux install was on a 486 from a box of floppies we got at a computer convention in the late 90s. Back then you had to do all sorts of crazy setup steps like figuring out drive layouts and screen frequencies. It was craziness but when you're 13 and want to tinker with computers that's what you did.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I've met people that struggle with the concept of shutting a computer down.

You are 100% overestimating the average non-techy

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

Watching a millennial (around the same age as myself) simply turn off the monitor when I asked her to restart really put things into perspective for me.

I don't take any knowledge for granted anymore, all my clients get step-by-step, stupid-proof instructions for even the simplest tasks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

Don’t forget to park the hard drive before you power down.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You are assuming they can't when in reality it is more that this is learned helplessness, they have been told over and over that they wouldn't understand anyway so they aren't even trying.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh no, these very same people have been told time and time again they can.

It's not a can't, it's a won't.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

Ah, the learned helplessness<->weaponized incompetence spectrum.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Me reinstalling windows for the 3rd time this year cause of some bsod:

  • yes
  • yes
  • yes
  • choose language
  • partition
  • log into forced account
  • no to telemetry 20x
  • sell your sole, give your personality up for theft to an aI and agree to never sue microsoft in their tos
  • reboot
  • find some guide on internet to follow step by step while I type commands into 20 different terminals, open 4 different control panels and use regedit to reduce the bloatware and spyware.

Me installing advanced user linux for the first time after previous process did not fix monster hunter from crashing:

  • choose language
  • partition
  • launch linux for first time
  • rpm fusion for nvidia drivers
  • reboot

If I had known linux runs games better I would have switched years ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Ok so now you gotta help me figure something out

Im sort of a hoarder when it comes to my data - as in I don't know what takes up 80% of my storage space but it does.

And I really want to switch to Linux, but the daunting task of finding where 8+ TB of data needs to go before I install it has slowed me down.

Actually 8TB isn't that bad thinking about it. Maybe it's just time to find anything I care about and just purge the rest, and start fresh?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It doesn't go anywhere. In the file explorer you can just open the disk and work with the contents. Linux can access ntfs drives.

You could detach them before installation, I did that with windows too in the past, to make sure they aren't accidentally formatted during installation.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

When you're on Linux, use czkawka to clean out your files. It searches for duplicates, big files, empty files, ...

Also works on windows, if you want to clean first.

https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka

btw, you're creating backups, right? A big disk 8TB is fairly inexpensive. Back it up before you do large file transactions.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

... Yeah we'll go with the idea that I'm creating backups

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You are the luckiest motherfucker on earth if your 8tb of data is safe on the same drive as windows.

Id just start fresh. Most of the crap you don't need. If you needed it youd know exactly what it is and would follow the backup law.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Oh it's not on the same drive as windows. It's just scattered amongst various SSDs

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I'd recommend Winderstat to figure out what's causing the bloat

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You're right. In fact, I think the easiest OS to install is probably some sort of Linux distro. But most people don't install their OS. And Windows is shipped built-in on many computers (even though we're starting to see some Linux options as well).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I grew up on Windows my entire life, but really only as a user until I got into teenagehood. I still remember when I was 12 and had to reinstall Windows 7, and I was given the option of either x64 or x86. I thought "Oh, my laptop is stupidly old, it's gotta be the lower number" and it took an embarrassing amount of time to then actually try the x86 option which immediately worked.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

“Do you want to install GRUB on /dev/sda?”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Solved with just one drive.

I overclomplicate my setup by having like 4 old hard drives of different sizes, cause I hate to throw them out.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ been quite easy for like a decade at least

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Two decades minimum, my first install was an Xubuntu live cd more than 20 years ago

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Fairsies :3 I just said a decade cause that's my first experience, and I couldn't be bothered looking into when the install process was really simplified for a random lemmy comment lol

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Ikr? At least we still have LFS /j

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I installed Slackware in ’96.

Things have most certainly changed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Easier than installing any other OS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I recently had to make a bootable iso for windows for someone in my family and it was a way bigger pain than linux, so.. not wrong lol

Never tried installing mac so can't say how the experience of that is :3

[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago

Installing MacOS on Intel Macs is really easy if you still have your recovery partition. It's not even hard even if you've overwritten the recovery partition, so long as you have the ability to image a USB drive with a MacOS installer (which is trivial if you have another Mac running MacOS).

I haven't messed around with the Apple silicon versions, though. Maybe I'll give it a try sometime, used M1 MacBooks are selling for pretty cheap.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Even arch was easy back in 2010 as long as you could read the guide.