Ran into this shit yesterday trying to set up a laptop for someone where I had no internet access.

Imagine having everything ready to go on a USB drive and you can’t get past the second screen unless you find WiFi.

At least this command still works, but damn.

Do it all again when msft undoes your work on the next update

Video games have gone this way too. Pop in disc or cartridge, go to play, forced to download updates that fix what was shipped in a broken state.

If you use Rufus you can create the USB that automatically bypasses the Internet requirements. Still annoying af though.

Back in the early 2000's I started playing with Linux on old machines and have used Linux on an off since. Now I only have one Windows laptop that I need for a few very specific things and it's Linux for any backend stuff. I've got pi's, nucs and a NAS, all Linux now.

I am so grateful for all the hard work people have put in over the last two decades making sure we can step away from Windows without having to go to the Apple or Chrome walled gardens. I've made a career working in the Microsoft stack and I'm so done with them.

Now if I could just figure out how to turn my windows laptop into a VM on my ProxMox machine.

I work in IT and half the time spent deploying a new device is getting around Windows' bullshit.

Sometimes when seeing Linux Memes like this, I think whether this one user with their 1-man-linux-hating-community simply blocked all these communities or reads them as some sort of rage-fuel.

windows didn’t have the drivers for my mobo, so i could use neither ethernet nor wifi.

imagine having to have a usb to ethernet dongle ready to set up windows.

what a fucking shitshow…

Nah he often jumps into my post comments to make some remark

Out of curiosity, what happens if you image the laptop drive and boot it under VirtualBox (keeping the Linux host offline, so the Windows guest can't phone home)? Potentially useful: https://superuser.com/questions/614400/how-can-i-clone-a-hard-drive-directly-to-a-vdi-image

I just don't plug in the Ethernet cable or connect to a wifi network. There will be a skip option if you aren't connected but it will pester you about how great it is to receive ads. Then once you actually get to the finished install you will have 30 days to setup an account and register otherwise you will get the little note in the bottom of the desktop that says you're using an unregistered version and get pop ups to remind you to register.

You don't have to connect it to the internet and register, it just annoys you until you do.

Who says you have to install Linux? Just run it directly on a USB drive to be extra flexible!

He's actually somewhat knowledgeable about Linux and he's putting a lot of effort into finding hairs in the soup. I think the guy just enjoys being an asshole and if it wasn't Linux he'd pick something else.

If someone asked me to install Windows for them I'd very politely tell them to get bent.

They removed the option. Even if you boot with WiFi off. So now you have to open CMD and run the command OOBE\BYPASSNRO reboot and it’ll give you the option to skip. Had to look that one up cause yeah it used to be just boot w/o Ethernet plugged in

I'll bite, I don't mind making an ass out of myself.

I've done installs of linux where the fact the internet connection was shit slowed it down. why is the fucking ·iso 4gb if it still needs shit from the internet?

Network installers

NixOs is in shambles

I’m convinced he’s a fed running a propaganda campaign because there’s no way someone’s expending that much time and effort and not getting paid for it.

the usual suspect is updates of all those packages since the iso was published..

Every time i see a comment about NixOS it makes me even more wary about trying it.

Everyone jokes about Arch being the 'from the ground up' OS, but Nix feels like it embodies those memes.

But, you can

I assume that he has a severe mental health problem. I had a neighbor who’s kid had schizophrenia and would spend all day writing about how we were hacking his dreams and other nonsense. The sheer volume of letters he wrote to us about it was staggering. A ream of paper or more landed in our mailbox every week. It’s amazing how much someone can do when they only can focus on a single thing and have way too much energy.

I felt sorry for the kid, when he was on his meds he was perfectly nice, if kinda odd.

I use this when I have to install windows.
https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

Fully automated the install

there’s no way someone’s expending that much time and effort and not getting paid for it

...you say on Lemmy, of all places. 😜

Windows is for people with no self-respect. Seeing them defend it is just sad in the same way as seeing a battered spouse defend their abuser.

Not even next update. I ran a debloater script that removed OneDrive and within two hours it had been reinstalled with no intervention from me.

Yeah nixos is a lot of learning and a lot of writing and tweaking .nix files.

That being said, once you have a setup you like that works it means installing on a new machine is mostly just running a couple of install commands and all your apps/settings/environment secrets/anything you’ve declared in your nix config (like dotfiles for apps unsupported by home-manager) come with you and are version controlled on the system and in code.

But it doesn’t work like a normal Linux system, there is no /bin/bash among thousands of other things, so it’s for a niche audience where it’s either a server with infra as code or a desktop that requires a lot of work to maintain but has some incredible advantages (like generations)

Are they? I have not checked their posts in depth. The ones I have seen in my feed were along the lines of "lol, Linux users do not shower / don't get women" or "if Linux good, why not used in Business" (what is a wild thing to say, considering... Well Servers), so that's the baseline I've had in my mind

To add to that: Some years ago, "remixing" installation/ive isos was kinda popular (changing defaults, installing software etc.). The first step was to bring the system up to date. After that, the actual installation process only downloaded small, incremental changes (depending on how long you waited).

Ok, must be recent. My USB stick of Win11 is less than a year old. Guess I won't be making a new one anytime soon

And memes like this and statements like these just feel like some pointless superiority complex circlejerk which achieve nothing to actually promote Linux adoption (or rather hurt it).

I like Linux, I've been using Linux on all of my desktop systems for a few months now and on various servers for many years. It's nice. A lot of things are great. But there are just as many hiccups to encounter. And the kind of superior, unhelpful attitude that a noticable part of the Linux communities show (whether that is just a vocal minority or actual major part is irrelevant to someone looking for help), especially towards new users who often have no idea about various Linux-isms, is really shitty.

Yeah it was my pipeline. But be wary, this is a hard path to take. The os is great. The package manager is great. The nix config language? Hahaha welcome to hell! It takes at least 6 months to get comfortable with it. And still, sometimes you can still come across a config file that will be totally alien to you. And when you need something not in the repos... time to learn how to package stuff!

It's not to discourage you, but be warned. It takes time. I had 5 attempts at it before it became my daily driver.

Keep a working distro on the side. And when you start your computer, think about what you want to do. If you think you can do everything you want today in NixOs, boot it. If you have a lot missing/do not feel like configuring it, boot the other distro. Just start small. Do some little challenges like turning your config into a flake, create a nix os module, split your configuration in smaller more maintainable files, create a systemd service, wrangle with that damn home manager that keeps making everything so confusing.

And arch is actually the one from scratch. NixOs is intimately linked to systemd. Nix also requires some base dependencies like git and curl, so it's not from scratch. However you could argue that NixOs is a "make a distro from the kitchen utensils and a recipe".

Just today and yesterday, one of my friends asked me to upgrade their windows server for their small business.

Installing a fucking windows took me 6 hours. This whole shit would be done in 40min I if I could install and setup Debian on their server.

And then they have the gall to point to sales of physical media being down.

Like, if you make your physical media shit on purpose, you can't use that to support your argument for digital-only distrubition. It's actually infuriating.

As someone pointed out below, Rufus does have a feature now that lets you check a box to do this automatically.

It could be done in 15 minutes with Windows as well, if you actually knew what you were doing. Hell, I'll give you 40 minutes if you know what you're doing and don't have proper tools already setup.

Windows is a shitshow, but your personal lack of familiarity isn't evidence of that, lol.

That's still rule of thumb on Windows. Push the updates into the install media in advance and save the trouble later. Guess since Linux updates tend to be easier they just stopped?

But there are just as many hiccups to encounter.

We're not talking about "hiccups; " we're talking about deliberate attacks against you. Linux has bugs, but with Windows, the OS is designed to serve Microsoft's interests at your expense. It's a categorically different thing.

Your statement is a perfect example of the sort of bargaining (in the toxic relationship sense) I'm talking about. It's the tech equivalent of saying "I fell down the stairs" when the real cause of your black eye was your abuser punching you in the face.

And the kind of superior, unhelpful attitude that a noticable part of the Linux communities show (whether that is just a vocal minority or actual major part is irrelevant to someone looking for help), especially towards new users who often have no idea about various Linux-isms

Note that absolutely nothing I've written here is about technical competency or "Linux-isms," but instead about psychology and business ethics.

I work as a sysadmin (luckily I work mostly with Linux). We have lots of tools for windows server setup on our company, and for most deployments, we have templates and checklists to deploy as quickly as possible.

It still takes at least 2 hours to deploy windows server from a checkpoint, and that's skipping all the initial installation. Most of that time is spent updating, debloating, and setting the most basic stuff up.

It takes me less time to set up a Linux server from scratch, without any checkpoints, than it takes my coworkers to set up a windows server for the 9999th time, with a decade worth of tools.

You can't be serious, or you must not support Windows much.

I don't think much of my workplace's Windows desktop "engineer" but even they've put together (and keep updated) an image that can get from blank drive to fully installed, updated, baseline programs for our company installed, all settings tweaked to get rid of 90% of the dumb Windows bloat (have to leave the shit the execs like in place) in 30 minutes unattended.

The server builds my team oversees are 10 minutes setups, if that.

Like, I've been desktop support, and installing and configuring the department specific programs could be such annoying shit that you'd end up saving more time reimaging when something fucked up than to try and fix it, but the initial OS install was rarely the issue. Maybe for the first few days with entirely new hardware while we figured out the right drivers, but that was it.

Linux is leagues better than Windows, but some of this shit I keep seeing in these Linux communities is batshit. You personally not being familiar with Windows isn't a reason it sucks, any more than people saying Linux is complicated is a reason for them to hate Linux.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll have to dig into this. I have no qualms about pulling my HD from the laptop and cloning it, so I should be able to try a bunch of different methods until it works.

For the stuff I need to do on my laptop, RDP is all I need so it can sit on a server in the basement waiting for me to start it up when I need it.

I am not unfamiliar with Windows in any sense thank you. Windows is objectively bad, there is no good reason that one must maintain their own custom image to install an operating system to a usable capacity because the vendor image is so disgustingly bloated that getting any real-world use is a chore.

And it's not even recent Windows enshittification that is the problem, it is the foundational architecture of the NT system. With a Linux operating system, you install, and you're done, on Windows, you install, then you need to go out and do 15+ updates that for some reason aren't done during install, then you need to go out and get all your drivers for your hardware. It's poorly designed, slow, clunky, and, especially considering that Windows doesn't have a package manager and a curated software repository (Winget + MS Store does NOT count), unbelievably insecure.

My organization has pretty much decided that Windows is on the way out, it's just going to be a very long time for us to transfer to Linux-based operating systems. Even after getting Windows to a just-about acceptable standard, it's still far heavier than any Linux-based OS would be, which for our thin clients is genuinely proving a problem as many of our staff have high memory usage workflows and are frequently seeing programs crash due to memory limitations.

Unless you are severely, clinically deluded, there is no way you can genuinely state that what you hear in Linux communities is "batshit"; everyone knows Windows is dying, even Microsoft...

For the record, the majority of games ship on disc. If you had auto updates off or no internet, the game will play after installing.

I think I've installed a Fedora server in 5 minutes. It's now literally 3 clicks if you're doing it manually.

Installed CachyOS half a year ago, the setup was short, involved, but no constant tweaking, my previous laptop was a Mint, same story, the installation process was made very simple and seamless a long while ago, unless you're purposely trying something complex, that is.

AFAIK the BypassNRO method doesn't work anymore, instead:

“When it asks for one's Microsoft account, press Shift + F10, and type start ms-cxh:localonly. This prompts the window to create a local account instead. 🖕” ―Bypass Windows 11 Microsoft account prompt

That's a feature of Arch Linux though. If you don't want that, there are bunch of distros you don't need tweaking.