I really am asking for a friend since I don’t use windows and am clueless about it. Also, my own computers are pretty old and don’t have UEFI, so I’m clueless about that too.
My friend just bought a new Lenovo Ideapad Slim 3 with Windows 11 Home preinstalled and it immediately sent her into some kind of Microslop enrollment hell, so (yay) she wants to trash Windows altogether and switch to GNU/Linux. I’m trying to help her through it. I do it myself all the time by writing a Debian MATE ISO to a USB stick, booting from USB, and running the Debian installer. But,
- that’s already too complicated for a not-really-nerd, and
- that doesn’t do anything about UEFI since I haven’t had to deal with that. IDK if her new computer has UEFI.
I prefer staying with Debian MATE since I’m used to it and the MATE UI is fairly familiar to Windows users, and GNOME is crap imho. But I’m open to whatever if that simplifies installation.
It would be great if there was a downloadable Windows executable that simply does everything. Install it, click it, it downloads a CD image and either writes it to USB or just manages to boot the image somehow. In days of yore you could do that with SYSLINUX or related stuff. Maybe there is something equivalent now.
That’s pretty much what Balena Etcher does. It even has a dropdown of common distributions if you don’t want to download the ISO yourself.
There might be something better (I use this on macOS) that I’m not aware of though.
don’t recommend balena etvher, it’s a weird electron app with telemetry for something simple as dd
use rufus on windows.