• FuckBigTech347@lemmygrad.ml
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      3 days ago

      Fr. Getting rid of Windows is the equivalent of cutting ties with an abusive person and moving out of an apartment full of Asbestos and black mold at the same time.

      • Zombie@feddit.uk
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        3 days ago

        Smartphone (if you have one), library, friends and/or family, local repair shop?

        9 times out of 10 you’ll never fuck it up enough that booting from a USB isn’t possible. Have a copy of whatever Linux distro sitting on a pen drive and if things go really bad plug it in and use that to troubleshoot.

        • naom3 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          2 days ago

          For booting from a usb I’d say it’s much more than 9 times out of 10. You have to really go out of your way to brick a computer to the point where you can’t boot from a usb

      • naom3 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        Not to try and harass you into using linux but if you’re worried about the installation going wrong you can just install linux on a separate partition so you can still boot to windows if you need to. Also it’s virtually impossible to mess things up so much that you can’t boot from a usb, and the typical way to install linux anyway is by flashing it onto a usb drive, booting from it, and then running the installer from there, so if something goes wrong you can just plug the usb back in and use that for troubleshooting

          • naom3 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            16 hours ago

            Installing Linux to a partition typically involves reformatting it[1] which would erase any files on it. So if you go the dual boot route (where you shrink the windows partition and make a new partition for linux) then all your files would be fine and you could just mount the windows partition from linux and access those files like they’re on an external drive. If you go the other route and install linux to the entire drive you’re gonna have to find a way to back up your files, probably by just copying them to a usb drive or an sd card, and then copying them over to linux once it’s installed. I don’t know that much about windows, or your files for that matter, but I think that even if they’re unorganized they’d still all be in like Documents, Downloads, Desktop, and maybe Pictures or something like that? So you could just copy over those folders, or all the folders under your user, without worrying about organizing them, or if you have enough space you could just copy over your whole C:// drive or something like that. If you have one drive this might be a good use for it but I can’t can’t say for sure since I’ve never used it.

            Alternatively you could install it like you would for a dual boot setup, mount the windows partition and copy over the files, and then delete the windows partition and resize the linux partition to cover the remaining space, but if you have a spare usb (in addition to the one you’d need for the linux installer) with enough capacity and you’re not already planning on dual booting windows I’d say go for that since it’s probably easier


            1. not always, but a) that’s generally more of an advanced setup and b) if the partition is formatted with NTFS (the windows filesystem) you’re gonna want to reformat it anyway. I mean, I think it is theoretically possible to run linux off of NTFS but that’d be very cursed please don’t do that ↩︎

    • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      3 days ago

      Luckily both my Windows machines went out a couple years ago. I replaced them with Macs. Would have been cheaper to replace the bad part and install Linux, but hey, I put my money where my mouth was.

      Is it much better? Who knows. I always liked Macs though. Games was the reason I wasn’t running one. When AI drove GPU prices up, I jumped. Have been pretty happy. To be fair, I still have an Xbox for gaming. Which is still Microsoft. But my personal data isn’t really on it, it just knows how I game. If I could do it all over again though, I suppose I’d have stuck with PlayStation.