So in 2013 I had a Windows XP computer that hard drive had died. By 2013 XP was a rather old OS. It worked perfectly fine, other than I probably could have done well to do a reinstall.
Problem is, in 2013 I was making $115 per week. I couldn’t afford to spend 2 months pay on a new PC. I had a spare hard drive I could replace it with, but the problem was, if I bought a new WinXP installation disc, it would cost $250 for an OS that was hard to find because of how long it hadn’t been supported. It would be like trying to find a Win Vista CD today…if they were still trying to charge full price.
So I thought “Ok, what if I try this Linux thing?”
So I did what everyone here is going to groan at me for saying. I tried the one everyone online was saying was the best one. Ubuntu.
I HATED it. The other thing besides my IMMEDIATE hatred for it, was the fact that it didn’t work. I couldn’t get the internet, or sound, or bluetooth, or a lot of things working.
And when I was going to the library, asking questions online, and then printing the answers a week later, everyone was saying “Oh, try these other disros…”
It is ASTOUNDING to me how linux users think. The answer to every problem someone else is facing is “Your way is stupid, that’s why it doesn’t work. Do it MY way, on MY distros”
Everybodys answer was that I was doing it wrong for using Ubuntu instead of (insert their flavor of the month here).
I must have downloaded 50 different distros and tried installing all of them one after another in a 3 month timespan. Hardly any of them worked. I think I got 2 of them to install besides Ubuntu.
Mint was one, I think the other was Cinnimon.
Some wouldn’t install at all. Some would crash frequently. Almost all of them had a solid green tint to the screen. Like it was missing video drivers. Eventuallly I just gave up.
After a few years, I eventually got a new Windows 7 PC in 2014.
And it’s been running fine ever since. But now we’re at a point where if you buy a new product, there’s a chance it won’t work with Windows 7. The problem is, I REFUSE to go to Windows 10 or 11 with how much privacy invasive those platforms have become.
So I was trying to see if Zorin could install this one program. 8BitDo Ultimate Software V2. But I don’t have much hard drive space to install Zorin. So I heard you can install it on a liveUSB. Since I just need to use the program once really, it didn’t matter if it’s going to be a temporary installlation.
Well, Zorin wanted me to install Windows Software App. So I thought I did. It asked me if I wanted to installl. I said yes. The spinny circle went around for a while, and then it told me I could either uninstall or open the app’s homepage.
After a few more attempts at fiddling with it, nothing happened. I came to the conclusion (maybe incorrectly, as it’s just my own assumptions), that maybe it’s not working because it’s not a permanent install.
So I used THIS GUIDE to try to make a persistant USB stick.
Everything went fine until the actual install at 5:59 of the video. At 6:00 he jump cuts to after the installation. The installation itself took roughly 5 hours.
And then it took roughly 30 minutes to boot. I googled it, and it should only take 15-20 minutes to install, and boot almost instantly.
Couple this, with an unrelated issue where I haven’t been able to turn on my fan on my raspberry pi for 4 years, and I think linux just hates me.
Three different sets of hardware. Video guides where I do exactly as they show. Nothing helps. Linux has always just NOT worked for me. Like it puts down a seemingly easy problem to fix, but then won’t actually do the thing you’re telling it to do to fix it.
Like in the guide he’s showing at 6:12. I’ve done every exactly the same thing he did, in the exact same way he did them, but he gets his second partition mounted as “target”. I don’t.
I tried sudo mount /dev/sdc/ but terminal spit out an error.
But I watched to the end of the video, and he says that part was only if you have errors booting the device. I did not have errors booting the device, so I skipped it, because it had been at that point close to 6 hours since I started the project, for something that was supposed to take an hour, and I just wanted to go to bed.
So the persistant drive boot sequence starts, and just starting the boot took 30 minutes.
And now, everything is just sluggishly slow. It’s like I’m trying to run Windows XP on a computer that would struggle with Windows 3.1
The hardware shouldn’t be an issue. Especially since supposedly Zorin 17 only needs 1.5ghz, duel core, and I have 4 core 3.75ghz. Every spec they listed as needed for Zorin I easily have double.
So I figure there must be some OTHER problem. And that’s where I am now. I’ve spent a combined total of about 12 hours trying to find some way to run 1 program for about 5 minutes. All I need to do is run it once. Then I’ll be done with it. I just need to find something that will actually run it.
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I’m not sure who told you that an installation on a USB thumb drive should boot “almost instantly” - that’s a much slower device than a proper HDD or SSD, and it’s normal for booting off of those to at least take a bit of time. The slow boot and the slow performance when running are probably both the same thing - slow disk I/O. A fast CPU helps run computations quickly, but installing and launching programs involves a lot of writing and reading files, which doesn’t have much to do with CPU speed.
1- linux 10 years ago and now are completely different beasts; I’m mainly referring to issues with making drivers work. if you have vanilla hardware, boot off a liveUSB stick and the vast majority of stuff just works.
2- you are absolutely on point on linux being noob-adverse and its users (although predominantly well-intentioned) can’t relate to people who aren’t into complex setup, shell commands and such.
3- you’d do well to steer clear of unconventional distros and stick to the middle of the road solutions, which is, and for the foreseeable future will be, Ubuntu. once everything works and you’re satisfied with the functionality, you’re free to distro-hop and switch DEs and whatnot.
4- steer clear from multi-booting different OS, that’s an advanced user scenario, and like with choosing your distro you need the vanillaest possible scenario - one disk, whole disk, nothing else.
I appreciate that funds might be tight, but a new SSD is under $20, used ones even less than that. disconnect all your existing drives (so you have a fallback solution), connect the new drive, install to it using the whole drive. your experience will change dramatically, we’re talking like 20x faster; making stuff work on a slow-as-molasses USB stick is just a horror scenario.
5- if you want concrete advice, instead of general observations, include your hardware - CPU, graphics, storage; some things are easier, some not, some are not even worth trying.
hang in there.
So I used THIS GUIDE to try to make a persistant USB stick.
Yeah you’re gonna want to use an external SSD instead. USB thumb drives can vary considerably in speed, and bottlenecking yourself there is gonna be a miserable experience.
Holy stream of consciousness rant
It sounds to me like you have been very unlucky with unsupported hardware, based on your network, sound, and graphics issues. Back in 2013-2014 this was a common problem, and while amazing progress has been made to bring support to much more hardware since then, unfortunately there are still some brands and models that are notorious for not having support. I’ve just learned to avoid these brands and do some quick research to see if hardware has mainline kernel support or if the manufacturer offers a Linux driver, before I purchase it.
I think another problem is that you are probably making things more complicated and less ideal by trying to run from a USB. Booting from a USB will be the opposite of instant. Booting and running programs will be VERY slow, because USB drives are not as fast as a proper hard drive, and it will take more time to load the system and programs into memory, as well as read and write persistent files. This will affect the system performance across the board, no matter how fast your CPU is.
Another issue is that you are trying to run an application for an operating system that is not the OS you are using. Again, amazing progress has been made over the past 10 years on compatibility layers and containers in order to run Windows programs on Linux, BUT it’s not always going to work for every Windows program. I’m not really familiar with the program you are trying to run. I think maybe the easiest path forward for this would be to look into running a Windows virtual machine.
When you keep getting the same responses and advice, I understand dismissing it as just people touting “their way” and “their distro”, but also, you have to consider that maybe there is a reason you hear this advice over and over. And remember that many many people, and the people offering this advice, are running Linux without these problems and completing all of their typical computing workflows with it, from gaming to productivity and development to running highly stable servers.
When following guides, you will need to tailor and customize commands to fit your exact situation, for example with your
sudo mount /dev/sdccommand, your drive may be named differently in your system, it could be/dev/sdbor/dev/sddinstead depending on the number of drives detected by the system, or something completely different depending on the kind of drive it is. Many commands you can expect to copy and paste directly, some you need to change to fit your system, and there is a learning curve to understanding when that is the case and how to make the required adjustments. There are a lot of poor quality guides out there that might not make this apparent.You’re using an operating system that you do not seem super familiar with, and you are trying to do things with it that are not really a typical or standard use case for it, so I think it should be expected that it will be a learning experience with potential issues to overcome along the way.
Is there an alternative program for Linux that does the same thing as the one you need to run?
In my experience, persistent usb systems are painfully slow depending on the combination of components. Is your usb drive fast enough (usb 2? 3?)? Is your usb port fast enough? Habe you tried different port on the computer? Booting from usb will most likely require the system to be loaded into memory, do you have enough for what you are trying to achieve?
That sounds awful. I’m sorry your experience on Linux was filled with troubleshooting. Sounds like hardware issues.
My favorite distros at the moment for “ease of use” is Fedora Workstation or Fedora Silverblue. They have a large user base and are well supported, making it easier to fix problems, which personally I have experienced very little.
Things that will make Linux more frustrating to test:
Laptops with dgpus, Desktops with Nvidia dgpus (though there are distros that solve that out of the box such as the https://nobaraproject.org/ created by the GloriousEggroll himself), Software inflexibility.
Personally I build my machines with AMD CPU and GPU to make linux sailing a bit more smooth.If your main software applications won’t work in Linux and there are no substitutes available that are good enough then you will have a bad time trying Linux. It’s like having a screwdriver without torx bits when all you use is torx screws.
OOBE\Bypassnro:
That said, if your Windows-only need is running peripheral apps to configure them then a refurbished Windows 11 Pro PC (desktop or laptop) that you keep disconnected will do it for you. The last saved configuration profile is (almost) always stored in the peripheral itself.
The trick is to:
a) not connect it to the network when it asks for it and,
b) Press Shift+F10 and run the bypassnro script in the oobe directory. (OOBE\Bypassnro)
The Windows out of the box experience will restart and the network requirement will be gone, you can now install with a local user instead of a microsoft account.
It will still spy on you whenever you connect it to the network, but you don’t have to connect it now do you?Things that make the experience hell even when you get it running:
Guides tricking people into running a full OS on an old USB-A Thumb Drive that doesn’t have the IO to handle it.My recommendation:
Buy a refurbished Lenovo T14s Gen2 or Gen3 with AMD, such as https://www.target.com/p/lenovo-thinkpad-t14s-g2-14-laptop-amd-ryzen-5-16gb-ram-256gb-ssd-w11p-manufacturer-refurbished/-/A-93371454.
Try any and all distros you are curious about until you find one you wouldn’t mind running as your main OS.Then either go Windows 11 Pro on your laptop again and run your linux distro of choice on the desktop,
or use the desktop as a pure gaming machine and do your privacy conscious stuff on the linux laptop.
If you love competitive online FPS games with kernel level anticheat then you’re stuck with the second option.
A third option is to refuse software that only works in Windows and go full Linux on your machines, but I understand that isn’t a reasonable option for everyone.Sorry you had a hard time with it friend. I hated Ubuntu Cinnamon, and when I switched to EndeavourOS my experience greatly improved, but I also am a tinkerer and I enjoy using command line.
I have no idea why your experience has been so cursed, but there is definitely a lot of GUI work to do to get the Linux QOL out of the box at a suitable level for people who don’t care about tinkering and daemons and update scripts.
what’s your hardware? some wifi/ethernet adapters just don’t have support in Linux :(
for persistence I’ve only ever used Ventoy, it’s a lot simpler i think and it allows you to choose the disk image to run on boot
I think the mounting /dev/sdc error is because you chose a disk, not a partition. if you run
lsblkorfdisk -lit should show you the partitions you can mount. It’s usually something like /dev/sdc1On my PC now? On my raspberry pi now? Or on my PC back in 2013?
On whatever it isn’t working on upon which you want to run Linux.
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Linux may be hating you, but that is not a reason to throw this tldr rant at us.
