I always hear that a normal computer user would never install an OS and that is the main reason Linux has not a higher market share. But I guess what we mean by that is that a user would never create a live usb, access the boot options and boot from there to install the new OS.
Is there a hard technical limitation when it comes to create a tool that installs a linux distro from a “normal” windows exe file, provided that the user first disables secure boot and fast boot (which are things a tool with admin privileges should also be able do on first run)?
Does such a tool already exist?
I feel like there’s something I’m missing, forgive my ignorance
Yes https://codeberg.org/viperultra/linixify-gui
Yes, I created such a tool,it works starting from windows vista, but it is not easy because of some features. From Windows, we must predict the name as the device will be called in Linux because the Mint installer does not know how to work with UUID for an automated installation, and then how the Ubuntu is changing the installer for parameters. This is a real hell
Forgive the not so serious remark: you can run Linux in Excel!
Back in the old days there was UNetBootin. Maybe it still works?
And for Ubuntu there is Wubi.
DONT USE UNETBOOTIN. This tool more often than not breaks something and causes issues for people. Somebody I know used it and broke booting into Windows, he had to use a USB anyway to fix the bootloader.
Ohhh I remember Wubi! No need to boot from an install media and you can install it entirely under Windows. That method of installing a dual boot never seemed to get super popular and I guess based on the OSes listed in that article, it seems pretty dated and not updated. I’m kind of curious to know whether or not it still works tbh.
If you have more than 1 Drive, you can just use a bash script and 7zip to unzip Linux to the drive, that does it
Otherwise you would have to resize a mounted partition, which is just more of a risk than smacking that user with a frying pan until he decides to learn how to install an OS
Another way explicitly banned by OP is running a script, which prepares a live USB drive and reboot to it. One would argue it’s the same process as your resizing a mounted partition method.
https://www.goodbye-microsoft.com/
p.s. oh, wait, the link doesn’t work anymore. too bad
Installing dual boot over a default windows installation would be tricky, bordering on infeasible. Because you would need to shrink the windows partition live (which is not supported (and even if you could, requires free space and comes with meaningful risk of data loss)) and alter the UEFI boot entries, which is also very risky and engineered to be protected from unauthorised writes.
Even if you got around all those limitations, Windows can constantly erase your Linux boot entries (thanks Microsoft), making a dual boot-on-one disk setup basically unusable every month which needs to be fixed. So thanks to this Windows behavior, this setup won’t work on many systems.
So you’ll pretty much only ever be able to install to another disk. And the portion of non-tech savvy users with a spare, unused disk is going to be effectively nonexistent.
Don’t get me wrong, an install-from-windows feature would be nice, but I don’t think it could feasibly overcome any meaningful barriers.
like 15 years ago you could install ubuntu through an exe on windows, but i believe they stopped supporting it, which sucks.
you may be able to find an archive of one of those old installers and install it like that, but i believe this was all the way back in version 11.04 or 12.04
