Would it be possible to lower barrier to entry that low?
To the point where installing some Linux distro would be as easy as installing a game on Steam or installing an application on a phone?
There is existing software for installing Linux from Windows.
For example, old WUBI for installing Ubuntu, and linixify-gui (fork of abandoned tunic) apparently does this as well.

So question is, should there be some effort put into making a modern installer of this kind? Something that even the person with the smoothest brain can use to get Linux on their PC?

Are there any existing projects that try to make this happen?

  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
    2·
    3 days ago

    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.