ESB77

I finally got around to building myself a desktop PC, and while I was at it I thought I'd also get around to having a dual boot machine again.  Last time I did that was around 2004-ish with Windows XP as an OEM install, and I did a partition and installed SUSE 9.x.   It was a long time ago and I didn't  keep up on Linux system administration, but I vaguely remember headaches involving paths, environment variables, and things with too many % signs in them to be easy to remember without taking notes.  It worked, it even had a passable GUI, but is was a bit of a pain in the butt to set up.  It did also get me onto the track of using Free software (FSF "free speech free, not free beer free") for almost all of my productivity applications.   After that computer I moved to another one that had BIOS issues with partitioning a GUID drive, so I just skipped a dual boot setup and lived with slightly out of date Windows ports of all the Free software I was used to using.
 
So with a brand new computer (yeah, I'm slow to upgrade hardware) even though 15 years is an eternity in tech, I was a bit shocked at how much easier Linux installs have become.
 
Download OS.
Download program to mount ISO image on flash drive (I used balenaEtcher)
Install on flash drive.
Set UEFI/BIOS to boot from flash drive
Click the obvious "click here" dialog boxes in the GUI until you arrive at a functioning desktop screen.
 
Identical to a Windows 10 install, except that their download automates the step that I used balenaEtcher for.
 
Wait, if Windows had one less step, how is the Linux install easier?
 
I don't feel like an install is really finished, that is the computer is ready to use, until a minimally acceptable level of user configuration had been done.   Wifi password entered, login credentials/user accounts sorted, etc.  If you care about user privacy and security at all, this is where Linux beats the stuffing out of Windows.  On a Linux distro, privacy is likely to be the default option, so basically once you have your username, password, and wifi setup you're done.
 
On Windows though:
privacy requires activating a multitude of not easy to find opt outs assuming they haven't deleted the opt out for a feature in the control panel in which case you might be able to partially opt out if you do a bunch research and open terminal to do some registry editing, provided you aren't scared about dire warnings about what can happen if you mess with the registry and there's almost certainly something you should have opted out of that you forgot about or couldn't find  Not to mention the terms and conditions that spend many pages telling you about a privacy policy that I can boil down to one sentence:
We (Microsoft) see you (customer) as a sheep to be fleeced as thoroughly as possible.
 
I do tend to at least partially read terms and conditions before clicking "I Agree" and with the Windows 10 terms when it comes to personal information it's hard to tell if Microsoft is offering you a really bad contract or if they're trying to deliver their official declaration of information warfare against you.
 
 There used to be fairly significant barriers to a "typical" computer user jumping ship from Windows, but after doing this install, I'm not sure that's the case any more.
It feels SO weird to write this but . . .
Linux might be the better OS for the average user?
 
Yes, you'd give up new AAA games, Adobe well not software so much as subscriptions these days, and some other sorts of niche software.
 
All told though, for me at least, if I lost access to FOSS productivity software it would be a disaster.  If I lost Windows and everything that depends on it then it would be at worst a minor nuisance.  Not the case for everyone I know, but if your income doesn't depend on software that's locked into a Windows environment I'm not sure I see what the selling points of Windows are anymore.  Fifteen years ago I could list a lot of them pretty easily, now, not so much.
 
Of course, I'm avoiding the choice entirely by going dual boot, but if I had to choose at this point I don't think I'd go with Windows anymore, where even 5 years ago I probably would have.
 
Oh, as Linux distros do vary, I suppose that I should mention that the version that blew me away with how easy it was to install and set up was openSUSE LEAP 15.1 with the configuration all done with YaST (If you're a Windows only person YaST is roughly equivalent to Settings + Control Panel for a lot of setup tasks).