Been a Linux user for almost a decade. Built a PC for someone recently and they wanted 11 Pro. Whatever, I shrugged, and downloaded the iso from Microsoft. I dd'd it to a usb, like every other iso, and boot to the installer menu. I'm greeted by an error that there are missing drivers. I'm familiar with this error, still, but I'm surprised to see it on the latest O/S. It looks exactly like I remember from 98. So, I spend two or three hours downloading drivers, copying to usb, booting up, waiting, selecting Find Drivers, manually choose each driver directory... and sub-directory, and sub-sub-directory. Error!.. Error!.. Installing... Hallelujah. An eternity ticks by as I watch a progress bar slowly filling up, indicating that, at last, Windows is installing the required drivers. At least it's finally doing something, I think... Nope! Despite loading every driver, the problem is never solved. No progress is made in two or three hours.
More hours spent internet searching. Apparently, that "missing drivers error, please insert media containing drivers" error has nothing to do with missing drivers. No, it's because I was dumb enough to think I could just DD a Windows ISO, like every other ISO I've ever encountered. Microsoft are special, I need to use special tools. Fine, OK, done.
Oh, you didn't think you could just boot the latest Microsoft Windows USB, did you? Oh no, friend, Microsoft corporation wishes to protect you from the threat of unsecured boot routines. You first have to choose the right combination of bios options to enable EUFI, or secure boot, or whatever.
Now you've chosen all the right bios options, and you have created the boot usb, in a Microsoft compatible fashion, let's go! Wait, is that a usb3 key? That might not work, best use an old usb2 one, oh, but not that one, use a good brand, and don't insert it into that slot, use the other one, the black one, no, not that one... ARGHH!!
Finally, after about 6 hours, it's installed. All that's left is to wait another hour or two while it updates and installs drivers, then install the other drivers from the motherboard makers website, and activate the licence. But the licence server doesn't work, I have to perform a phone activation. That means all the usual pain of automated phone systems... like, listening for 10 minutes to all that "hey, did you know it's easier to activate online? Simply log on to this, and that, and activate your licence the easy way! Are you sure you don't want to do that? It's easier, you know? Ok then, let's get ready to do a phone activation. You can still hang up, though, just hang up! No? Oh, ok then... Please enter your 64 digit code, and, if you get that right, I will give you the 64 digit response code that you can enter into your PC"
At this point, I'm honestly wondering if I can sue Microsoft for the (hopefully mild) PTSD I will inevitably suffer from this.
I'm never installing windows, for anybody, ever again. Ever. Never, never, never.
Sorry for the long rant, but I thought, maybe, talking about it, openly, might help reduce the nightmares. Oh, the nightmares.
> Been a Linux user for almost a decade. [...] No, it's because I was dumb enough to think I could just DD a Windows ISO, like every other ISO I've ever encountered. Microsoft are special, I need to use special tools.
You haven't been a Linux user for long enough. The Linux ISO you can "just DD to a USB key" is a hybrid ISO, which is actually a hack which has both a HDD-style partition table and CD-style headers, carefully set up so that their data areas overlap. Early Linux ISO images, like every other ISO image you would encounter back then, weren't hybrid; they could only be booted from a CD drive, and you had to use special tools to convert them to something which could boot from a USB key, or you could instead DD a floppy disk image (helpfully found in a directory within the CD image) to a floppy disk and boot from it (it would still read all the installation files from the CD).
Couple years ago I bought a Thinkpad, back when everything came with Win10 but you could still do the Win7 downgrade. I tried to do just that, but everything went sideways in roughly the same ways as your post, just with different details.
After two weeks and getting Lenovo to physically FedEx me some Win7 recovery media and I STILL couldn't get the license key to take, I threw up my hands and decided to see if 2017 might truly be the year of the Linux desktop.
I threw Ubuntu on it and everything was just flawless. From the first boot. Set up full-disk encryption with no hassles at all, pointed a backup target at my NAS, found a few Gnome tweaks to correct little UI misfeatures like the alt-tab delay, and went on about my day.
As a lifelong DOS/Windows user up to that point, but now a 6-year Linux convert, I wonder why I waited so long. At some point Ubuntu hosed itself in a dist-upgrade so I switched to Pop!OS, which took less than an hour and I restored my last backup and everything just works again. It's bizarre that anything could be so trouble-free. Case-sensitive filesystems still annoy me but I'm slowly memorizing all the weird capitalized directories and stuff, a small price to pay.
This post needs a trigger warning lol. I couldn’t count the hours of my life I’ve lost to installing / updating/ fixing Windows. I put Linux on all my computers about 6 years ago and have no regrets. If something breaks it’s usually my fault, and it’s always way easier to fix. And updates beat the pants off both Windows and Mac.
Built a couple systems for people at the start of the pandemic; tried to install Windows for them and bounced off it somewhere around the "not that USB stick, not that USB slot" issues.
Microsoft has always been great at providing excuses and reasons why your expensive computer isn't doing what it could. They're just getting better and better at that.
FYI, to get a bootable Windows USB key, you don't need any special tools or DD. Fresh format it with NTFS, and simply copy the contents of ISO onto it. Somehow it works pretty reliably.
More hours spent internet searching. Apparently, that "missing drivers error, please insert media containing drivers" error has nothing to do with missing drivers. No, it's because I was dumb enough to think I could just DD a Windows ISO, like every other ISO I've ever encountered. Microsoft are special, I need to use special tools. Fine, OK, done.
Oh, you didn't think you could just boot the latest Microsoft Windows USB, did you? Oh no, friend, Microsoft corporation wishes to protect you from the threat of unsecured boot routines. You first have to choose the right combination of bios options to enable EUFI, or secure boot, or whatever.
Now you've chosen all the right bios options, and you have created the boot usb, in a Microsoft compatible fashion, let's go! Wait, is that a usb3 key? That might not work, best use an old usb2 one, oh, but not that one, use a good brand, and don't insert it into that slot, use the other one, the black one, no, not that one... ARGHH!!
Finally, after about 6 hours, it's installed. All that's left is to wait another hour or two while it updates and installs drivers, then install the other drivers from the motherboard makers website, and activate the licence. But the licence server doesn't work, I have to perform a phone activation. That means all the usual pain of automated phone systems... like, listening for 10 minutes to all that "hey, did you know it's easier to activate online? Simply log on to this, and that, and activate your licence the easy way! Are you sure you don't want to do that? It's easier, you know? Ok then, let's get ready to do a phone activation. You can still hang up, though, just hang up! No? Oh, ok then... Please enter your 64 digit code, and, if you get that right, I will give you the 64 digit response code that you can enter into your PC"
At this point, I'm honestly wondering if I can sue Microsoft for the (hopefully mild) PTSD I will inevitably suffer from this.
I'm never installing windows, for anybody, ever again. Ever. Never, never, never.
Sorry for the long rant, but I thought, maybe, talking about it, openly, might help reduce the nightmares. Oh, the nightmares.