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from the it's-2015-and-things-are-easy dept.
I remember a story on the other site years ago when, following the Mojave Experiment, some guys did their own Folgers Test, asking people what they thought of this new (unidentified) UI and most of those folks thought it (KDE) was just more of Redmond's stuff.
Now, there's this story from OpenSource.com.
- Linux is so easy, anyone can install it--even by accident
One day, [...] a user's Windows install went corrupt on her laptop and she accidentally installed Linux. When her laptop couldn't [load the OS] from the hard drive, it automatically booted [to] the network. When she got the PXE install menu, she just hit Enter, installing a Linux desktop with all of our default network security settings and applications.
She then logged into it with her network account and emailed me to say that her Windows had updated and she wanted to know why her Microsoft Office looked so different now and "Where did Outlook go?" We had a good laugh over how Linux is so easy you can install and configure it by accident now, even on a laptop.
Hat tip to Robert Pogson for spotting this. The comment by IT pro oiaohm is, as always, insightful (once you adjust for his dyslexia).
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 24 2015, @09:00PM
Sometimes its not so simple.
(Note: my other desktop installed mint just fine with no issues and has worked great for over a year. Both are using Nvidia cards driving and the same monitors. I've never had anywhere near this much trouble with Linux before)
So I'm on my 5th reinstall on Linux mint on my new desktop over the last week. (I am unwilling to use Ubuntu after the whole local search ads mess, but I want good Steam support, so Mint is a great choice)
First two installs were not bootable because the drive I'm installing to is only UEFI bootable (SAMSUNG SM951 M.2), and the installer doesn't even show UEFI as an option at install time, it just seems to use what ever mechanism was used to boot the installer (which didn't use UEFI by default). That was fun to sort out, and I learned some useful stuff.
3rd install was great (Once I got the legacy options setup in my bios so it could modeset properly so I could get my drivers installed). I had everything setup and working: I was happily gaming with steam. The next day (when it was restarted) it fails to start the X server, but reports no errors (just successfully exiting with code 0), and corrupts the error screen with some boot status text printing from the terminal. X would start from the terminal, but a lot of stuff was broken (no sound, no shutdown button, chrome didn't work). I tried some recommended fixes, but I broke it worse.
I went for a 4th install with a better partition scheme (separate home and data partitions I could keep) in-case I had to reinstall again. Again X broke in the same way once I got everything installed. This time I tried Xorg -configure, but that seg faulted (Lots of other people apparently had this happen and I didn't see any solutions). Further attempts to recover broke the system further. X seemed to not work if I had both my monitors plugged in after rebooting and installing some stuff, but by the time I determined this, my system was already in a pretty bad state (my desktop environment crashed on startup).
Install 5: this install was really easy since I have my home and data partitions preserved and a list of commands same to install all my software now. It's downloading updates now. I wonder if it will break when I connect my other monitor. Perhaps I can actually manage to debug it this time.
Install 4 had extra issues: I installed Remmina for RDP, but I used the version for the Mint packages. It was too old and didn't support gateway servers. I removed it and installed the correct newer one, but when I ran it, it still ran the old one. WTF. I tried several apt purges which did remove it and various re-installs but it kept running the old one. In the end rebooting managed to escape the zombie version. How can that even happen...
Also, the Mint installer's verify package contents option fails to display to the screen with my hardware, just a black screen. One of my other computers ran it fine though. Great. I blame Nvidia.
Next up is getting file sharing working for linux windows and mac, then setting up backups, then getting it all working as a FreeBSD duel boot (which is why I got Nvidia hardware despite my dislike of them: they have official FreeBSD drivers). Maybe I'll throw on Windows7 VM on it too: but no hardware bootable windows: I promised myself I wouldn't do that anymore. I wish escaping Windows was at easy as listed in the article for me. Regardless of difficulty though, I will escape Windows: there isn't a choice anymore.