I installed Windows 11 on my new office PC yesterday, and it took hours.
The initial boot took forever because it decided it needed to do an update as part of the install,
Then after install when you enter your Microsoft account details so it downloads the entire internet including OneDrive (gross),
Then you switch to AU locale because despite saying I’m in Australia during install it’s set me up as US language and currency and imperial measurements etc but Melbourne timezone (also incorrect),
Then you uninstall and disable all the stupid Candy Crush and celebrity news (in the start menu?? why??) and LinkedIn and Xbox gaming crap and all this other stuff that just appears,
Allocate another day to uninstall all the MS Office stuff I don’t want (especially OneDrive),
Then you can install Firefox and Thunderbird and Nextcloud and Libre Office and Irfanview and accounting software,
And finally everything starts syncing and away we go time to be productive…
Jokes! Critical update and it’s time to reboot multiple times.
I can boot from a Ventoy USB and have a new distro installed and working on my laptop in under an hour ffs.
This has happened twice now: I’ll build a new PC about the time my father will buy a tower from Dell.
Mine comes in 4 boxes from 3 vendors over the course of a few days. His arrives fully assembled with an OS installed.
I take 3 or 4 hours to put the machine together, boot into a Linux live session, let the installer run, I get up and do something else while that goes. When that’s done, I boot into the OS, run a big ol apt or dnf or whatever command to install most of the software I like, that runs for awhile, that installs my backup software. I restore a file backup from my old machine, that runs for an hour or so, gotta love spinning rust external hard drives. And then I’m moved in and up and running.
My father, meanwhile, will:
Erase the copy of Windows that Dell included on the machine and install it fresh, which might be the only way to actually remove McAfee.
Spend an entire week, full time, installing software. Downloading setup.exes from vendor websites, running install wizards, telling Windows “Yes, put these program files in the Program Files folder” several dozen times in a row, installing some stuff to include MS Office from disc, which Windows increasingly fights him about.
Somehow also taking a rather long time manually restoring file backups.
Tweaking settings for DAYS.
I’ll have an SSD fail. I’ll go to Best Buy, buy another off the shelf, pop the thing in, and either reinstall the OS and my software, which is a rather straightforward automatic process, or simply restore my most recent file backup, which is a couple clicks, depending if it’s my / or /home drive.
My father…look, some men build model train sets, some men paint, some men plant gardens, some men fish, my father backs up his computer. I have a cabinet full of HIS backup hard drives because he’s playing pretend he has “offsite backups.” When he suffers an SSD failure, he:
Comes over to my house to monologue about it for 5 to 10 minutes
Spends an afternoon on the phone with Dell. At some point he convinces them to honor the warranty he paid extra for.
1.5 weeks later the one service tech Dell has for this state arrives with an SSD and installs it.
Engage the full manual reinstall business, because 1. he’s got his whole system on one drive, and 2. for some reason he isn’t willing to actually use the full system image backups he takes.
I see and acknowledge your /s, but the serious answer is Ventoy doesn’t but many Linux distros offer OneDrive support out of the box and the onboarding process will help you set it up.
Installing Windows 10 or 11 has never taken more than an hour for me, from initial boot all the way to finalizing all updates. Don’t know what your issue was, but it is not the norm.
I installed Windows 11 on my new office PC yesterday, and it took hours.
I can boot from a Ventoy USB and have a new distro installed and working on my laptop in under an hour ffs.
This has happened twice now: I’ll build a new PC about the time my father will buy a tower from Dell.
Mine comes in 4 boxes from 3 vendors over the course of a few days. His arrives fully assembled with an OS installed.
I take 3 or 4 hours to put the machine together, boot into a Linux live session, let the installer run, I get up and do something else while that goes. When that’s done, I boot into the OS, run a big ol apt or dnf or whatever command to install most of the software I like, that runs for awhile, that installs my backup software. I restore a file backup from my old machine, that runs for an hour or so, gotta love spinning rust external hard drives. And then I’m moved in and up and running.
My father, meanwhile, will:
I’ll have an SSD fail. I’ll go to Best Buy, buy another off the shelf, pop the thing in, and either reinstall the OS and my software, which is a rather straightforward automatic process, or simply restore my most recent file backup, which is a couple clicks, depending if it’s my / or /home drive.
My father…look, some men build model train sets, some men paint, some men plant gardens, some men fish, my father backs up his computer. I have a cabinet full of HIS backup hard drives because he’s playing pretend he has “offsite backups.” When he suffers an SSD failure, he:
Don’t forget the whack-a-mole of finding which ‘features’ got turned back on with the critical updates.
But does Ventoy have OneDrive?
/s
I see and acknowledge your /s, but the serious answer is Ventoy doesn’t but many Linux distros offer OneDrive support out of the box and the onboarding process will help you set it up.
This might assist you in the windows horrors
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
Use Windows LTSC
Installing Windows 10 or 11 has never taken more than an hour for me, from initial boot all the way to finalizing all updates. Don’t know what your issue was, but it is not the norm.