this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
34 points (94.7% liked)

Linux

54336 readers
275 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] pishadoot@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 hours ago

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).