Windows -> Linux Fight
Written:
Every time I try to wipe Windows off of a machine and replace it with Linux, it seems like it gets just a little bit harder. A hair less intuitive, a smidge more frustrating, and just a tad more complicated.
Take yesterday, for example.
I have a Dell XPS 17 9710 laptop which I bought with Windows 10 Professional. I decided a few weeks ago that I was done with Windows and Microsoft's crap, and wanted to put Ubuntu 24.04 on it, nuking Windows entirely.
I've done similar things many, many times before, and history has shown me the first step of this process is to do a search for the exact model of machine and Linux distribution to see what shenanigans other people have experienced.
There were really no surprises. Most obviously, the Done Thing is still to disable Secure Boot, since with it enabled getting things like your video card working can quickly turn into rocket surgery.
There was also a note about the SSD this machine comes with, and a suggestion (via Arch installation notes) to change the SATA mode from "RAID On" to "AHCI/NVME" whatever that means. (I dug down this hole for ten minutes and decided I don't care how my SSD works. Maybe I'll care in the future.)
Other than that, we were good to go. So, I plugged in a USB stick with the Ubuntu 24.04 installer, rebooted, and finger banged the F12 key until the UEFI screen came up. I made the changes, and rebooted again off the USB stick.
Install started to go mostly fine. Everything came up great, hardware recognized, no trouble with wi-fi (always the wildcard, in my experience), and we're good to go.
Then, oops! "This drive is protected by BitLocker. You need to disable it in Windows, or tell Ubuntu to erase the whole disk."
Co-incidentally, I got this error right after I, in fact, did tell Ubuntu it could use the whole disk.
*headdesk*
See, BitLocker is Microsoft's answer for full volume encryption and includes various integrity-preserving stuff. If you're running Windows 10 Home like most people on the planet, you don't need to worry about it. But if you did the Galaxy-Brained thing and bought the Professional edition, it comes enabled on your machine.
I'm guess this is why I didn't turn up any warnings about this when I searched beforehand.
Well, the Ubuntu installer flatly refused to accept that it was totally okay to just nuke the whole drive and use it, and I didn't want to go through the process of getting Windows booted back up after I diddled the UEFI settings.
So GParted it is! I fired it up, manually deleted every partition on the drive, created a new one, and rebooted back into the installer. Thankfully, that did the trick.
But again, I want to point out that this is an additional step I had to take this time which I didn't have to take the last time.
What's more, just take a moment to think through all of this. Sit back and go over the steps I just laid out, and the ones I left implied.
In order to get Ubuntu on a machine running Windows, you have to download the installer, get it onto a USB stick in bootable fashion using one of several utilities, go into your UEFI settings and change multiple things, boot off the USB stick, edit your partition table, and finally install the new OS.
Exactly how is an average, even fairly-computer-literate user supposed to do this?
I recommend Linux to people all the time. I recommend free and open source software in general all the time. I expect I'll be recommending these things even more in this, the Year of Our Void 2025.
When I encounter the rare person who says "You know what? I'm sold! I'm going to run Linux. How do I do that?" I'd really like to not have to respond with "Well, therein lies a tale."
I'd also like to not become their sysadmin, which thus far has been the only viable option.
All of which is to say, computers were a mistake.