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.
I know your struggle. It’s not uncommon to experience issues with the Windows installer if the install medium is not created using Microsoft’s official Windows installation media creation tool (Use the middle option to download mediacreationtool.exe).
Coming from Linux, I tried writing the Windows .iso directly to a USB drive using dd, this absolutely would not work on any machine for me. Sometimes the install medium would boot, sometimes it wouldn’t, but even if it did the installer wouldn’t recognize any storage mediums or would fail part way through installing. Using the official media creation tool resolved all the issues I was having.
I do not know why the Windows .iso images do not work on any of my machines, but it sounds like you are experiencing the same issues that I was. Give the official media creation tool a try, hopefully that resolves the issue.
The answert for this problem is Ventoy.
When I first tried Mint, I had to return to Windows because of Adobe stuff and I still didn’t feel comfortable with dual booting back then.
No matter what I do I can’t get the Windows 11 ISO I flashed with Balena on Mint to work. It boots but when it starts to copy its files to the hard drive it keeps complaining about not being able to read the USB.
I still can remember the burns I got when I cooked my neighbor caldereta for dinner later that afternoon. It was my thank you for him letting me use his Windows PC to burn the ISO to my USB. We sacrifice a lot for Linux lol 😅
Much later I realized that I could’ve just flashed Ventoy and copied the ISO to the USB. Should’ve Googled some more before bothering my neighbor 🙃