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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: 2) by NCommander on Sunday October 25 2015, @01:19PM
If there's one thing Linux does best, its network booting and deployment.
At a previous employer, I had to experiment and setup Windows Deployment Services, which requires a lot of fiddling and pain to get right. While its relatively easy to get a standard interactive install going, to automate it, you have to create a special unattend.xml which controls the first stage of the installation, including partitioning, and other settings. Then you have to create a OOBE_unattend.xml file for the first boot. To create these files requires using a pain in the ass utility which loads a WMI file from WDS or from CD (copying it) to generate a catalog, then use an interface that's poorly documented and fiddly to insert all the correct settings in the correct stage, and the correct point for it to all "work". This can take hours to just get a basic unattend setup going, let alone automatic AD joining, and similar pain.
Image customization still requires the usual sysprep and imagex dance, and seems to take 1-2 hours just to capture a 5 GiB HDD image.
All I can say is its better that RIS which WDS replaced. RIS basically copied everything to the local HDD and then installed it from there as the Windows kernel of the era couldn't handle ramdisks or non-local root drives. (that feature was added in Windows PE which was based off XP).
Still always moving