this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
702 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
82551 readers
4286 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For most of us on Lemmy, buying a PC with no OS installed is like buying a car with an empty fuel tank and/or battery. It's ready to preform at 100% in about 10 minutes.
For most other people, it feels more like buying a car that's completely missing an engine/motor/battery. They don't even know where to start, even though in the case of the PC the process is many orders of magnitude simpler.
Right, and to be clear I'm not suggesting to "just" buy a PC without an OS.
I'm suggesting both PC manufacturers and OS providers make an effort to facilitate that step.
One good example IMHO would be Raspberry Pi and its Imager. Yes you get your Pi but that's not just it, you can get install Raspberry Pi OS ... or Ubuntu, Apertis, RISC OS Pi, ... but also media ones e.g. LibreELEC, OSMC, etc ... or emulation with RetroPie, Batoccera.linux, ... but still more with RaspAP, MoodleBox, ... and countless others. You follow the steps thanks to a colorful GUI, put a microSD card in when prompted, wait, remove it, but in the SBC, boot and voila.
I'm not claiming it's perfect or that anybody could do it but I believe it's a good compromise ihelping people getting the OS they need if only they are genuinely ready to spend 10min for it.
In retrospect that whole value proposition is nuts.
The suggestion here is to spend 10min, let's say 1h if the connection isn't far and the USB stick (or microSD) is slow... for something you will then use for years onward. Typically one does NOT re-install an OS frequently unless they want to (e.g. tinkering quite a bit or distro-hoping).