Comment on System76 tries to talk Colorado down over OS age checks
Zink@programming.dev 4 days agoFor most of us on Lemmy, buying a PC with no OS installed is like buying a car with an empty fuel tank and/or battery. It’s ready to preform at 100% in about 10 minutes.
For most other people, it feels more like buying a car that’s completely missing an engine/motor/battery. They don’t even know where to start, even though in the case of the PC the process is many orders of magnitude simpler.
utopiah@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Right, and to be clear I’m not suggesting to “just” buy a PC without an OS.
I’m suggesting both PC manufacturers and OS providers make an effort to facilitate that step.
One good example IMHO would be Raspberry Pi and its Imager. Yes you get your Pi but that’s not just it, you can get install Raspberry Pi OS … or Ubuntu, Apertis, RISC OS Pi, … but also media ones e.g. LibreELEC, OSMC, etc … or emulation with RetroPie, Batoccera.linux, … but still more with RaspAP, MoodleBox, … and countless others. You follow the steps thanks to a colorful GUI, put a microSD card in when prompted, wait, remove it, but in the SBC, boot and voila.
I’m not claiming it’s perfect or that anybody could do it but I believe it’s a good compromise ihelping people getting the OS they need if only they are genuinely ready to spend 10min for it.
utopiah@lemmy.world 4 days ago
In retrospect that whole value proposition is nuts.
The suggestion here is to spend 10min, let’s say 1h if the connection isn’t far and the USB stick (or microSD) is slow… for something you will then use for years onward. Typically one does NOT re-install an OS frequently unless they want to (e.g. tinkering quite a bit or distro-hoping).