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Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

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Re: Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

#71

Post by rcxdude »

vetinari wrote: post #66
voltagex_ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Rufus author has capital O Opinions on this: https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/wiki/FAQ#user-content-Blah_...

He is wrong; UEFI does specify FAT (section 13.3). It does not prevent supporting other filesystems, as well as other partition schemes or volume formats (nothing prevents UEFI from supporting LVM, for example), but only FAT and GPT are mandatory (i.e. "must"). Thus only FAT and GPT are implemented in 100% of shipped computers. Yes, you can get Intel NUC and yes, it does support NTFS in UEFI. It is also compliant wit…

That is exactly what he's saying, except on top he's saying that rufus can supply a driver for NTFS for UEFI firmware that does not support it.

Re: Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

#72

Post by Zetobal »

gameoverhumans wrote: post #45
Zetobal wrote: post #29

I don't even want to install Arch the Arch way.

It sounds like you're the kind of person who wants a computer that "just works" with user-friendly point/click software out of the box. You're absolutely not the target audience of Arch Linux, nor this "Arch-like" Windows install guide. Personally, I learned more about modern Linux userspace by following the Arch install process (and subsequently maintaining an Arch install for daily-driver use) than I ever did from…

And I did it 2005 with gentoo and scratch... it's unnecessary and you could have learned the same using ubuntu or whatever distro without debugging your system. But you are right as a noob it probably helps to do everything by hand at least once. The most annoying part about Arch is that if you look in forums, reddit or mailinglits a lot of users don't really learn to debug. They fuck up their system and install from scratch... so in the end a lot of them are really good at installing Arch but nothing else.

Re: Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

#73

Post by taway1237 »

antihero wrote: post #68
greatcircle wrote: post #13

I installed Windows 10 the other week - it kinda blew my mind how poor the install experience was. The iso contained files greater than 4GB, which breaks fat32, which I'm sure many people are still using on flash drives. So I had to use an MS cmd-line tool to split the wim files manually and edit the install files. Why doesn't the installer just use smaller archive files?

> fat32, which I'm sure many people are still using on flash drives Why on earth would you do that? People have been using exFAT for many years now.

Isn't it still a default somewhere? I recently formatted a pendrive on Windows and somehow mindlessly selected FAT (and ofc had troubles down the road). I probably picked a default somewhere. And to respond your question:

>Why on earth would you do that? People have been using exFAT for many years now.

Most people have no idea what FAT is. If presented a choicee between FAT, exFAT, NTFS and ext4 I'm certain they don't care, don't understand the implication, and would just click a random option. Which is OK, not everyone should be a IT expert, it's MS job to make the experience smooth.

edit: and a technical reason: i think FAT32 is the only guaranteed fs supported by UEFI

Re: Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

#74

Post by rcxdude »

smabie wrote: post #43
tucosan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't even want to install Arch the Arch way. Then don't. You're simply not part of the target audience.

I don't wanna install Arch the Arch way either, and I've been running Arch for over 10yrs The Installation just sucks for no purpose. Actually it's worse than that they used to have a TUI installer but then removed it

The installation is minimal because arch is a minimal developer effort distro. Think of arch as a bunch of devs making a distribution for themselves and if anyone else happens to use it, that's fine. It makes a lot of their decisions make a lot more sense.

Re: Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

#75

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #28
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you'd use the same method as installing other OS and people would realise installing a Linux distro is easy. Of course MS already made it much harder with secureboot and "accidentally" wiping Linux installs when you install it second. Given the massive updates you immediately have to download, and the heavy push for only installing with an online account, there seems little reason to have anything beyond a m…

Meh, I don't have any love for windows, but IME newish versions seem quite well-behaved regarding Linux. Sure, they'll rewrite the UEFI boot order, but once you set it back to what you want, it leaves it alone. The one thing I absolutely hate, is the recovery partition at the end of the main C: drive. So that if you want to grow the C drive, you have to jump through some ridiculous hoops to move the recovery partitio…

I've had windows break my truecrypt disc. And this was recently.

Installed W10, after Fedora - Windows does a scanning and repairing drive and destroys a 1.5TB 60k hours drive with a full truecrypt disc encryption unrecoverable with the backed up TC headers. Annoying but not the end of the world. I've had issues with Windows installs in the past not knowing the file system on a drive and just using it. A reason which made me paranoid and I will always unplug drives I don't want used during a Windows install.

Re: Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

#76

Post by noirscape »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #28
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you'd use the same method as installing other OS and people would realise installing a Linux distro is easy. Of course MS already made it much harder with secureboot and "accidentally" wiping Linux installs when you install it second. Given the massive updates you immediately have to download, and the heavy push for only installing with an online account, there seems little reason to have anything beyond a m…

Meh, I don't have any love for windows, but IME newish versions seem quite well-behaved regarding Linux. Sure, they'll rewrite the UEFI boot order, but once you set it back to what you want, it leaves it alone. The one thing I absolutely hate, is the recovery partition at the end of the main C: drive. So that if you want to grow the C drive, you have to jump through some ridiculous hoops to move the recovery partitio…

It's honestly behaving better than MBR since you don't need to boot a Linux liveUSB to fix the UEFI boot order. It requires some CMD commands but recovering (or heck, just installing) rEFInd is a rather painless affair compared to recovering a busted-up grub installation.

Re: Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

#77

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy »

0xcoffee wrote: post #18
greatcircle wrote: post #13

I installed Windows 10 the other week - it kinda blew my mind how poor the install experience was. The iso contained files greater than 4GB, which breaks fat32, which I'm sure many people are still using on flash drives. So I had to use an MS cmd-line tool to split the wim files manually and edit the install files. Why doesn't the installer just use smaller archive files?

I believe Microsoft provides the Media Creation Tool for this purpose. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-installat...

For Windows. I don't know if it changed but if your browsers user agent is not Windows you'll always get access to the .iso file as direct download.

Windows iso these days can just be unpacked to a NTFS thumb drive.

Re: Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

#78

Post by vetinari »

rcxdude wrote: post #71
vetinari wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is wrong; UEFI does specify FAT (section 13.3). It does not prevent supporting other filesystems, as well as other partition schemes or volume formats (nothing prevents UEFI from supporting LVM, for example), but only FAT and GPT are mandatory (i.e. "must"). Thus only FAT and GPT are implemented in 100% of shipped computers. Yes, you can get Intel NUC and yes, it does support NTFS in UEFI. It is also compliant wit…

That is exactly what he's saying, except on top he's saying that rufus can supply a driver for NTFS for UEFI firmware that does not support it.

He frames it differently; more optimistic than the reality on the ground. He is also conflating things in a way that does not work (just because Intel ships something does not means that it is a standard to benchmark compliance to spec against it; it creates unnecessary confusion. Intel has a right to implement things above the spec, but it does not mean that spec mandates such things).

You can ship your own filesystems, volume managers, device drivers... but they should be signed with a key trusted by Secure Boot, if you want them to be useful at all. Most users are not going to disable SB for your snowflake of efi binary; especially if it is OS installer.

As a result, nobody (nobody in Spolsky's sense) really bothers. When you are shipping bootable media, fat is good enough. It will boot your binary, do stuff it is supposed to do, and everybody goes on with their lives.

Re: Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

#79

Post by hparadiz »

ThatMedicIsASpy wrote: post #75
vladvasiliu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, I don't have any love for windows, but IME newish versions seem quite well-behaved regarding Linux. Sure, they'll rewrite the UEFI boot order, but once you set it back to what you want, it leaves it alone. The one thing I absolutely hate, is the recovery partition at the end of the main C: drive. So that if you want to grow the C drive, you have to jump through some ridiculous hoops to move the recovery partitio…

I've had windows break my truecrypt disc. And this was recently. Installed W10, after Fedora - Windows does a scanning and repairing drive and destroys a 1.5TB 60k hours drive with a full truecrypt disc encryption unrecoverable with the backed up TC headers. Annoying but not the end of the world. I've had issues with Windows installs in the past not knowing the file system on a drive and just using it. A reason which…

That only happened cause the disk appeared uninitialized to windows. Though I agree that it shouldn't touch any disks that aren't the install destination.

Re: Install Windows the Arch Linux Way

#80

Post by malermeister »

smabie wrote: post #43
tucosan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't even want to install Arch the Arch way. Then don't. You're simply not part of the target audience.

I don't wanna install Arch the Arch way either, and I've been running Arch for over 10yrs The Installation just sucks for no purpose. Actually it's worse than that they used to have a TUI installer but then removed it

Just use endeavourOS, it's basically arch with a nice installer and sane defaults.
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