I always hear that a normal computer user would never install an OS and that is the main reason Linux has not a higher market share. But I guess what we mean by that is that a user would never create a live usb, access the boot options and boot from there to install the new OS.
Is there a hard technical limitation when it comes to create a tool that installs a linux distro from a “normal” windows exe file, provided that the user first disables secure boot and fast boot (which are things a tool with admin privileges should also be able do on first run)?
Does such a tool already exist?
I feel like there’s something I’m missing, forgive my ignorance
https://www.goodbye-microsoft.com/
p.s. oh, wait, the link doesn’t work anymore. too bad
What about this as on alternative:
Instead of trying to make people install an OS or have to buy a new machine with Linux pre installed, just sell NVME drives with a Linux distro. Something like Mint, or Ubuntu. In my experience Linux is really good nowadays in recognizing hardware plus the people who would be the target audience are unlikely to have some exotic PC setup, probably just a standard off-the-shelf laptop with very common components.
Hmmmmmm… I think the hardware bugs might be rare, but common enough to make this a tricky product to sell consistently to the unknown masses.
Also, I think storage partitioning could be a problem; assuming some number of people would have other drives that they had OS/media together, or just separate storage with files they wanted to keep. Those would be NTFS, which can read/write on Linux but you won’t have the best compatibility with Linux program execution (depending on a ton of factors).
I run bazzite on my AMD CPU/GPU gaming rig I just built. Installed it on a new blank SSD, no windows ever. Computer has run steady since it first booted, Haven’t even had to open the terminal yet. All my games play out the box
Point is yes you are correct that you could definitely sell them ready to go potentially! Still hard to account for every single permutation/combination of hardware people will have, but there are some that are more predictable than others. Any modern AMD build for instance will likely play fine with bazzite.
Yes https://codeberg.org/viperultra/linixify-gui
Yes, I created such a tool,it works starting from windows vista, but it is not easy because of some features. From Windows, we must predict the name as the device will be called in Linux because the Mint installer does not know how to work with UUID for an automated installation, and then how the Ubuntu is changing the installer for parameters. This is a real hell
Forgive the not so serious remark: you can run Linux in Excel!
What’s not serious about this?
It’s not what OP asked for.
We’re training him wrong on purpose
Back in the old days there was UNetBootin. Maybe it still works?
And for Ubuntu there is Wubi.
DONT USE UNETBOOTIN. This tool more often than not breaks something and causes issues for people. Somebody I know used it and broke booting into Windows, he had to use a USB anyway to fix the bootloader.
Ohhh I remember Wubi! No need to boot from an install media and you can install it entirely under Windows. That method of installing a dual boot never seemed to get super popular and I guess based on the OSes listed in that article, it seems pretty dated and not updated. I’m kind of curious to know whether or not it still works tbh.
If you have more than 1 Drive, you can just use a bash script and 7zip to unzip Linux to the drive, that does it
Otherwise you would have to resize a mounted partition, which is just more of a risk than smacking that user with a frying pan until he decides to learn how to install an OS
Another way explicitly banned by OP is running a script, which prepares a live USB drive and reboot to it. One would argue it’s the same process as your resizing a mounted partition method.
like 15 years ago you could install ubuntu through an exe on windows, but i believe they stopped supporting it, which sucks.
you may be able to find an archive of one of those old installers and install it like that, but i believe this was all the way back in version 11.04 or 12.04
