I’m helping a family member build a pc. He wanted to use Windows because “Linux can’t play games” despite me having a perfectly good gaming laptop running Linux that runs all my games, even graphically intensive ones.
2 days later, no game has been played yet. We can’t even get steam to start. I even installed Arch on a sata ssd I donated just to verify the pc parts actually work (took less than an hour). It took 1 and a half days to even get the Windows 11 installer to get past like the 3rd screen.
Fucking fuck. Dealing with all this fucking bullshit is far worse than not being able to play a few trashy anticheat pay 2 win games. The anti Linux circlejerk is real.
You’re going to hear a lot of people saying how straight forward Windows is install; I’m avoiding W11 so have my W10 anecdote.
The only way I’ve ever been able to install W10 is to disconnect every single peripheral except m/kb and one single drive.
Anything else over the years, be it different mobos, HDD,SSD m.2 thingies it’s always been the same; anything more than m/kb and one single disk W10 shits the bed.
If you’re still struggling, try that.
I use Windows 10 LTSC (the Enterprise edition with long-term updates and way less bloat) for this very reason. It’s the most tolerable version of Windows for me and I’m not planning to make the switch to Windows 11 anytime soon.
In addition to the above, If it’s a “backup copy” of windows, trying an official iso. I’ve had bad copies get suck at installed and never work no matter what I did.
There’s a way to pull the windows product key from the BIOS using Linux too. Quick search will give you the command. I’ve bought used lenovo minis for my self hosed k8s env and save the win keys if I ever need a windows VM for something.