Would it be possible to lower barrier to entry that low?
To the point where installing some Linux distro would be as easy as installing a game on Steam or installing an application on a phone?
There is existing software for installing Linux from Windows.
For example, old WUBI for installing Ubuntu, and linixify-gui (fork of abandoned tunic) apparently does this as well.
So question is, should there be some effort put into making a modern installer of this kind? Something that even the person with the smoothest brain can use to get Linux on their PC?
Are there any existing projects that try to make this happen?
Your options to try out Linux without disrupting your Windows experience are:
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WSL, which is using a Linux kernel that is running in a VM (WSL 2). This will let you run some Linux applications on Windows.
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Live Disk, This gives you a full Linux environment but may lack persistence (your settings are loss on reboot) and performance issues (using a USB drive as a system drive is slow).
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Linux on a VM, This gives you a full Linux environment with persistence and good performance but you won’t have access to your hardware, like your graphics card, to do things like gaming (You maybe able to use passthrough, I haven’t used Windows VM software in quite a while).
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Dual Boot, The full Linux experience. Requires another hard drive or a willingness to resize your partitions (which could* destroy your Windows install).
The installation step is trivialized on some distros, just a simple series of dialog boxes. Like installing Windows was in the 00’s before you had to watch streaming ads and give it access to your medical records while creating your OneMicrosoft Online Co-365-Pilot Teams Drive Pro account.
*I have literally never had a single problem resizing partitions in 20 years of doing this, but it is technically possible if you lose power or are really unlucky with the cosmic ray lottery.
e: To your question directly: As long as you’re not trying to mess with Window’s system partition you should technically be able to resize/create partitions, create a new file system, copy files, and add a boot entry from inside of Windows. Ubuntu was the last big project to have a sustained effort to attract new users, WUBI was a big part of that project. Now, there just isn’t as much interest.
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there is and i also think there should be.
but i would never use one or recommend doing so.
I have seen distros that offer methods for installing Linux directly from Windows but I wouldn’t use them. Live CDs are a good way to test if that distro, or even Linux in general, will work properly on that computer. For example, if you installed Linux on a computer with a WiFi adapter that Linux doesn’t currently support, you wouldn’t have known this if you just installed Linux directly from Windows without testing it first and there is no simple solution to this problem.
Now, if you could install Linux onto an external hard drive from Windows, then this might be fine because you’d have a dual boot between the two OSs and can easily fallback to Windows if Linux doesn’t work properly. However, as far as I’m aware, you’d still need to boot into the bios and change the boot loader so that Linux can actually boot.
There’s nothing easier than booting from a thumb drive and clicking “install”, IMO. Having to load Windows first is just adding an extra step.
Not for those who are not sure about Linux. Installing an app and launching it, is a familiar task and quick to do, to take a look. No need get a usb stick and do unfamiliar steps right just then.
Then if Linux looks good, and you want to keep it, now you have the motivation to sort out how to install it. It’s a different task.
Many people don’t do that, because they dont know what Linux looks and feels like. So they won’t install it.
WUBI did a good job of that.
Back in the days of CD Drives you just inserted the linux disk from a magazine or from a bestbuy that sold OpenSUSE and did a restart and it booted from CD ready to install, just like you’d install a game.
USB stick is just as simple but people don’t know the process to make the stick or boot and hit the f key that gives them temp boot device options so it is a “harder” process
This might not be feasible. IDK how you could install a whole OS, inside of another, without looking like a serious virus or malware. There are many files that cannot be changed while Windows is running (why it needs to reboot so often for updates). And no sane OS is going to let a program edit things like the MBR.
This used to be a thing, my first ever ubuntu install was made through such a tool (damn I might be getting old), a .exe that I ran on my windows 7 and that rebooted to a live ubuntu environnement.
we had it back in the day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZipSlack
I may be misunderstanding your post but is WSL not what you’re looking for? It’s quite simple to install and setup. It’s Linux inside Windows.
Yes, and so is a virtual machine. I’m thinking install Linux to disk so that it can then run directly on hardware.
Rest assured, microslop will find a way to break it.
It used to be that way and they blocked it probably over a decade ago. Like, you could check your drives folder in Windows and have a live Linux CD in in D Drive, click in it and a Linux installation process would start.
I find that live USB drives, like the Linux Mint installer are a fantastic way to show potential converts around. If they like it, all they had to do is click install.
You mean something like Operese ?
I heard that one is pretty recent.
There’s not a lot of ways to directly do what you are talking about. Closest I can come up with would be a small program that shrinks the windows partition, creates new partitions for the linux install, reboots into the new linux system, kicks off a migration tool that deletes all the data you don’t want to bring over, shrink the windows partition again, migrate data over in chunks to the home folder partition, resize and move more chunks, eventually deleting windows entirely and leaving a fragmented mess of a Linux install with a lot of chances for shit to go wrong.
It’s safer and cleaner to back up, wipe, start over.
I mean, Microsoft could supply an option to safely install Linux as a dual boot, alongside Windows, done by Windows, itself.
That is the only way I would trust such a tool, and even then, I might not.
There’s so much closed source code involved in doing it that way - it feels like only Microsoft staff could have any hope to verify compatibility of all the necessary components.
Booting to a Live USB Linux first provides a clean-room - a known, publicly verified open source platform - to perform the installation from.
Such a clean room can be avhieved within Windows, but only by Microsoft engineers with full access to the entirety of Microsoft’s source code.
My question is: why do you want the “smoothest brains” on linux? That won’t happen until OEMs are selling hardware with linux preinstalled, which they do on chromeos and android btw.
IMO blind adoption for the sake of it brings no benefit
Run it in a VM. That’s the only way you’re going to accomplish the workflow you are attempting.
