this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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I am currently dual booting and trying to get feature parity in my Linux install as a reletave newbie.
So far the largest hurdle I've been able to solve was getting my RAID array recognized. That sent me down a rabbit hole.
To get it working in Linux I needed to:
To get it working in Windows I needed to:
You'd normally use a software raid implementation these days, and Linux has a number of those. But yeah, dual booting can expose some quirks and filesystems and disk setup in general is one of the most prominent.
This. How an advanced use case is accomplished is not a point against a system's usability.
The point I was trying to make is that if you ever want to do something that is not covered with an out of the box install, it's typically far harder to do in Linux than in Windows (although my ~15 years as a windows sysadmin probably bias my opinion)
Windows is turning into a telemetry nightmare because about 10 years ago Microsoft figured out that they could sell ad space and monetize user data, so I'm trying to get off the platform before my LTSC install hits EOL. But I have to admit it's a hard path.
Now do a raid like it's typical for Linux and get it to work on Windows.
Oof, hoops you have to jump through to get two disks in a mirror on windows still haunt my dreams sometimes
So basically: it's not any harder in linux, but you have more than a decade of muscle memory in windows, so it's harder for you.
That's like saying "Japanese is a less efficient language than English, all of the words are different, and when I want to say a word, I have to learn it first, but in English I just know the words! English is so much better! (My 30 years speaking english probably bias my opinion)"
Things are certainly different, but its hard to compare which is "harder" for the advanced use cases.
There's no shame in having long term experience with one platform and having that shape your expectation about how a solution should look.
But in your example raid controller driver was covered in an out of the box install in windows. If it wasn't you'll still need to do pretty much the same. Also there was a couple of weird steps in your linux list like switching DE to run a couple of CLI commands and disabling AHCI for some reason.
Congrats on taking the plunge. I suspect there are others like you.
I'm actually kind of envious. The joy and frustration and joy again of exploring something new was something I relished in my early Linux years. Back then you had to use a text editor to configure your video card before even getting started, so it was kind of insane haha. But totally worth it later, as all of those skills translated.
For advanced, power user stuff, I find Linux to be much friendlier and faster. Just being able to do everything in a Terminal instead of having to mess around with a mix of inconsistent GUI menus in the two different control panels, gpedit, regedit (which is an entire headache by itself), a mix of cmd and Powershell (and whatever Windows Terminal is) is just so much less of a headache.
Also I find things easier to script in Linux compared to Windows.
Not to mention the mess that is Windows Update, which doesn't even upgrade third party software, and takes a long time to actually do the updates. Package management is a godsend. Windows has chocolatey and winget, but those are poor substitutes.
And I say all of this as someone who is technically proficient in both.
This is kind of the same situation I'm in, but I'm not quite as tech savvy and I'm more resistant to learning linux even though I'll still probably want to migrate over at some point.
What I don't really understand is, or, what I understand, but I suppose I find mildly amusing, or confusing, is how many criticisms I've seen of windows that kind of just don't apply to LTSC as much, if at all? It's kind of to the point where I wonder why anyone would really use any other version.
20 years ago it was PCMCIA wifi drivers.
Now it seems like it’s always some kind of disk boot filesystem issue.
Are you using hardware RAID? yeah, that doesn't go too well with Linux... works perfectly in Windows though, cuz their softraid solutions are shit.
Server-level hardware RAID is fine on Linux. It has to, because manufacturers would cut out a huge chunk of their market if they didn't. Servers are moving away from that, though, and using filesystems with their own software RAID, like zfs.
Cheapo built-in consumer motherboard RAID doesn't work great on Linux, but it's also hot garbage that's software RAID with worse performance than the OS implementation could give you. I guess if you're dual booting, you'd have to do it that way since I don't think you can share software RAID between Windows and Linux. It's still not great.
That is what I actually meant.
That's why you don't do RAID at all on a daily driver. You make/buy a NAS for that kind of thing. Maybe just RAID1 in hardware, cuz that's easy to set up and generally just works, even with low end hardware solutions.
It's called FakeRAID for a reason.
Why have I never thought about this? Dual boot and bit by bit work on feature parity while still having an OS that's my daily driver.
Beware of the W̷̞̬̍̌͘͜ĭ̴̬̹̟͕̒̆̈́n̸̢̧̙̈́̅̂̆̕͜ͅd̵̟̟̪͎̀̀ő̴̼̺̺́̐̂͘w̵̨͊̀s̵̡͎̭̊ ̸͔̬͔̜̊́̈́̌̈́ͅŬ̴͉͚̳̌̉͘͝p̸̼̅̆͐̃̑d̸̜͂ǎ̵̛̯̏͝ť̷̰é̸͇͝ as it can screw up/overwrite your other bootloader completely.
Kinda sucks, when you've got a meeting/work and you find out that forced update made your system unbootable/partially unbootable and you now get to live boot in and go fixing the EFI partition manually, in the CLI.
That happened to me once and that's when I decided feature parity was less important than a reliable system that "just works" for getting things done on a schedule. (I removed windows completely, in case that wasn't clear)
Anyhow, make sure you install windows to a separate drive that can't see any others during the windows install, then will keep the bootloader separate.
I ran into similar issues before. My plan was to install Linux on a separate M.2 so Windows won't interfere and manually boot the OS I want to manually.
Proprietary RAID in linux is a shit show. That's why everyone uses software RAID.
After a while, you'll hit a point where parity is impossible going the other way.
I'm running a striped partition and a mirrored partition with only two drives, and using an SSD to bcache the whole thing. I've even got snapshotting set up so I can take live backups.
I have no idea where to start with that setup on Windows.
I had a hell of a time just trying to get Mint to write to an external drive, including unmounting and remounting the drive countless times trying to get it to mount as rewritable (adding it as a mount option wouldn't work in terminal or in "Disks"), it would just refuse to let me write to it, I could still read everything fine. I finally quit, got a second drive, backed all my stuff up and reformatted the first one, which Mint now sees and writes to just fine despite being configured exactly the same way it was before.
That is a massively condensed story, and if I ever have to look at fstab again I might just have an aneurysm. Y'know how hard it is to write things to an external drive in Windows? You plug it the fuck in.
Anyone who says Linux is ready for the masses is deluding themselves. It's fine for nerds, people who like to work on their computer, but it is absolutely not ready for people who like to do work on their computer. Not when something as simple as "yes I'd like to save this to an external drive please" turns into a days-long rabbithole of bullshit that culminates in me buying an extra 8TB drive off Amazon.
I've been using Linux for too long because that list of steps sounded completely reasonable to me.