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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.
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I don't think it matters so much. It's possible to test Linux literally in seconds with nothing to install thanks to virtual machines on the Web. It's risk free.
What prevents people from migrating isn't technical, it's mostly FUD and marketing (not to say lies) from MicroSlop.
Asahi linux does this, you run a script and it installs. No USB needed. That’s on apple silicon hardware though.
That would a security risk. It would allow the micrsoft kernel to change what is written to disk.
That's what Secure boot and TPM attestation is for
There’s not a lot of ways to directly do what you are talking about. Closest it 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.
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.
The topic is specifically about installing Linux, so that's what I was considering. If a person just wants to see what it's like, then booting into a live image still seems easier than booting into Windows first and then running Linux in a vm or some other type of software that can run one OS inside another.
Many will already have a running Windows system. And running an app is an every day task for people not experienced in IT matters. Setting up and booting into a live image involves several steps completely foreign to many people. Maybe not to you. But there is a massive difference. These things matter if you've never done it before. Barriers like that are putting people off installing Linux.
Run it in a VM. That's the only way you're going to accomplish the workflow you are attempting.
I feel like this may backfire, because people may accidentally replace their OS, get really pissed off, and start talking about how installing Linux is really dangerous and might wipe all your data, etc.
I don't even think it could work. NT will bsod if the os drive disappears, so unless you install on a different drive or partition, the OS will die.
You could just have a UI that runs you through all the questions and prompts from Windows and then reboots and installs a new OS without any other interaction.
You could even have it ask which files/folders the user wants to transfer over so they don't lose everything.
You can do that without Windows. What is the benefit?
It's trivial to make a USB bootable installer.
It's trivial for you.
The average windows user has no idea what "Rufus" is, or how to enter the bios and change the boot priority
Especialy nowadays with "features" like fast boot that removes the "press f# to access bios" prompt on startup to "speed-up the boot process"... Hell even when disabled (both OS and BIOS wide) some computers won't ever show me the damn thing anyway.
Until a few months ago, I was a Windows user, and I had been since the 90s.
This was the method I used
Not sure why people are downvoting you. It's a simple enough task that the risk of LLM hallucination is very low.
Suspect it is just from people who dislike AI but in my experience using it as a replacement search engine for some stackoverflow type questions is about the only useful thing I've gotten it to do.
I'm positive it's because of people hating on AI, and while I don't want AI in everything, it does have it's uses. I use it for work to write delivery documents, but I give it very constrained operating parameters. It can be incredibly useful if you do.
Give it a persona: "Senior Software Developer" Give it truth parameters. "You must not assume. You must not hallucinate. Any information presented must be factual, and backed with documentary evidence using citations. Any information that can not be proven with citation, must be marked, and you must provide reasoning." and so on and so on. I have a whole sheet of prompt shortcuts I use for different types of documentation based on target and subject.
I also read and fact check everything it produces. I follow every citation and verify it says what the AI thinks it does. I also do section by section. I don't produce whole documents, I produce sections and compile them together later.
I treat it like a research assistant, not like something to do the work for me. I usually do a brain dump of random thoughts and things I know are important for the document I am working on, be it a collection of point forms, emails I receive, news articles, and so on.
AI has made my job more efficient, because I can pump out 30 pages in a day, where that used to take me a week. Especially since I can produce two documents, one for a non-technical C level, and one for a technical person at the same time.
Because a link like that is lazy and sarcastic, a bit like posting a lmgfy link
The intention was sarcasm, because I felt it was better than my initial response of, "What a stupid take".
As I originally said, it's trivial, but someone always feels the need to come in and shit on everything.
Nope. The installation menu is more complicated. We used to do it from Windows back in the day no problem.
Yes, this is something that should be taken into account when designing this software.
Set dual-boot as a default / design UI in a way that offers dual-boot as a preferred option.
And many other technical issues will probably appear that will have to be figured out.
But I think that at least even thinking about this is a good start.
Also, this reminds me of 2013, when people accidentally nuked their Windows installs with Linux because they wanted to get the Tux in Team Fortress 2 (Valve gave it to people who played Linux version of TF2).
There are reasons this hasn't been done before.
There are a lot of things you're not considering. You'd need to potentially re-partition a live mounted window disk(s) to create space for a Linux partition which will fail spectacularly. Or install over a running Windows system which will also fail very quickly.
Also - there are many tools that make it easy to create a live USB drive that one can boot from to get a taste of Linux in a way that is non-destructive and optionally install Linux.
WUBI did it really well. It got a lot of people on to Linux.
It has been done before despite reasons.
We used to do this all the time.
Do what?
Hmmm yeah I wasn't thinking about a dual boot default. That could maybe work 🤔
I have a hard time imagining a less rewarding user-facing software to be maintainer of. That’s probably why there isn’t one.
Thousands of hours and being blamed for dozens of people softbricking their PCs (which they now probably lack the USB route to recover from) - all because writing an ISO to USB and rebooting is too much friction?
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.
Anyone that cannot figure out how to install linux probably shouldn't be fucking with their operating system in the first place.
You can also just buy a live USB distro and install by doing nothing more than turning off your computer and turning it on again, which is even easier than installing a program in windows.
Furthermore, there is a very real argument to be made that you should NOT be able to EASILY nuke an operating system from within itself. Windows devs would be pretty reasonable to define any program able to easily do that as being malware.
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
there is and i also think there should be.
but i would never use one or recommend doing so.
This is how we did it before MS enshittified the boot loaders.
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.
There does exist a tool that does it. The creator posted about it on the fediverse. It only supported ubuntu at the time but looked extremely promising.
I cannot remember it's name. :/
Maybe it's linixify? But I remember seeing a post on lemmy with a youtube demo?
I can swear Ubuntu was able to just do this out of the box years ago, as long as you were okay with the Ubuntu partition being FAT32...
you'd still have to boot from cd, but i do recall one of the early versions happily moving everything from your old windows install. i'm still moving around my wife's files from her xp install every time i need to set up a new /home part for her.
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.
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.
Your options to try out Linux without disrupting your Windows experience are:
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.
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).
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).
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.
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.
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