Ventoy my beloved.

Solution: install windows for them, but complain and evangelize at every opportunity. You'll be so insufferable they'll never ask you again.
- I do that every time I have to use windows. But I think my boss does not like that...
- Another solution - install Windows 2000, which was the first and the last good Windows distro.
  
  Another solution: install a Linux distro in kiosk mode and make the browser home page https://www.windows93.net/
  
  lolll
- Constable Odo treatment.
  
  Thanks for reminding me that the DS9 box set is a high priority on my ripping list
- I don’t need friends that are Windows users.
  
  I don't care what they use, be it linux, a BSD, OSX, Plan9.... but windows?? that is pathetic!!
- Tested and guaranteed.
- Or don't
  Use whatever you want to use. You can always say no to support requests.
  
  I charge a consulting fee. If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

i installed linux mint on my sisters household PC last week.
my dad did his usual grumblings about "it should be windows" and i just said "i've been out of the windows ecosystem completely for the last 5 years and partially for another 3 years beyond that. i no longer provide support for windows, if you want them to have windows you need to support it"
he went quiet after that.
- Why does your dad have an opinion on what your sister use?
  
  he's still coming round to the fact he's not getting security updates soon due to lack of a TPM module.
  He'll be running mint too by the end of the year
  
  Right? OS arguments over Thanksgiving dinner sounds like kind of a good time.
- Honestly that sounds like a jerk move. Why would you force someone to use Linux? It isn't your computer and if you are helping them you should do what they want. I wouldn't be surprised if they bought a new machine and then ghosted you.
  
  Where did they say they forced anyone? They just said they installed it.
  
  It's not hers. it's one of my computers that i am deploying to her house for her and her family to use.
  It's technichally for my neice but the rest of the family all also have access.
  no one in that household has expressed a specific preference of operating system. other than my brother in law texting me to tell me one of the old games he tried to install doesnt work (i did promptly offer to "make it work" but he declined).
  I have no problem with them installing windows on it if thats what they want. they wont be coming to me for technical support if they do though.
  
  Honestly that sounds like a jerk move.
  Quite the opposite,
  Why would you force someone to use Linux?
  In what world is that force ? He wasnt holding a gun to her head, the opposite, he's freeing her from stupidity.
  Decent people help others, they don't go along with their stupid ideas before at least trying to convince them its a stupid idea. An allegory perhaps, your friend comes over, they have a 1/2 dozen beers, they're going to drive home... In your world it seems it's force to ask them not to and to stay over.
  It isn't your computer and if you are helping them you should do what they want
  Helping them is the phrase you seem to be confused about. It's his sister, not his boss at the office.

Me with 40$ 1tb external ssd with ventoy be like
- I can't fit an SSD up my ass. :(
  
  Not with that attitude
- I tried that too, it wouldn't reliably boot on things it should have. I remade it on a mechanical drive, same settings, and that one will boot on anything I've thrown it on so far.

I always install openSUSE without removing my buttplug. Or any extra USB cables.
- I dare you to use it for bios updates. Better don't clensh your butt or you'll brick your board
  
  Two bricks would be made in that case. >!In that PC case.!<
- Oh yeah I have that too. Just sit on the PC case while you are installing. ( ￣▽￣)
  
  Idk i think if it was my usb stick it would fry it
- Uhm... Where can I find that? For a friend, of course! (⁠◕⁠ᴗ⁠◕⁠✿⁠)
  
  Well, I only know of one and you'll need 12 angry men to pull it out.

Windows? Not heard of that distro before, sorry.
- They must've meant Lindows, very common mistake.
  
  Lindows is deprecated. Must've meant Wubuntu.

Meanwhile me with a CD book that has 17 bootable DVDs and CDs plus a separate DVD+RW for more random, less permanent crap and a portable USB DVD drive (the drive is sourced from e-waste and fails to write both DVD+/-RW and CD-RW at 4x, only 2.4x and 10x respectively work).
I like spinny media.
I mean, I also have a Ventoy disk, but I haven't used it for a looooong time because it's no fun, but discs are.
I just need a bigger backpack. The WRT54GL is taking up quite some space too.

Much cooler than ventoy, no?
- You have all that up your ass!? ( ; ﾟДﾟ)
  
  I mean, they have a hole in the middle, so if I stack them they let stuff pass.
- Disks are fun, lol are you a masochist?
  
  I bet you never heard its cool sound.
  brrrrRRRRR PS PS bRRR PS PS, PS PS, zzzzZZZZZMMMMMMMMM
  best thing ever
- As someone who loves collecting/hoarding things, major jealous.
- Not to mention iso booting from a disc....just works. Too many times I've tried booting various USB images only to have it fail for unknown reasons, the host machine has this weird quirk of not able to boot from a 3.0 port or...idk
  
  Oh boy, you haven't met some Dell Optiplexes.
  That shit, for whatever reason, can't boot from internal DVD drive. I tried with 2 of them. Both had functional drives, I tried disabling secure boot, enabling legacy boot and some other settings which seemed related, but nothing worked. Then for shits and giggles I tried a USB DVD drive and that worked just fine.
- I have several dvd drives. Pretty sure none of them works. They have been sitting unused too long. At least one has a permanently deformed rubber band, that drives the spinny thing. They dry out with time and sitting still.
  I prefer solid state stuff.
- Just be sure you've got those backed up. CDR bitrot is real and it can hurt you.
- Which version of the GL?
- I used to have hundreds of movies, games and a couple linux distros on DVDs and CDs.
  I threw everything out years ago. It was cumbersome and it sucked. It was a waste of time.

Impressive, very nice. Let's see Paul Allen's 256GB Ventoy USB with 118 Linux distros and 36 ISO boot tools up his ass
- When did you get so tasteful?
- Is that... BoneOS?

Was the Ventoy binary blob issue resolved and it's cool again?
- No. But the argument itself is so stupid to me.
  Ventoy has never been a secure tool. People are making the argument that it should be, which is just nutty.
  If you're one of those people that grab random fuckin' ISO's from all over the internet to test em out, then no. You really shouldn't use Ventoy. If you run official ISO from recognized sources, then realistically the risk is ever present, but minimal.
  Like getting in a wreck on the way to the store to pick up milk. It's always a possibility, but not many people would stand around and make the argument that you should stay home forever because you might get into an accident, which is basically the argument against Ventoy. It's "we'll, it's a crazy useful tool, but you shouldn't use it because something might happen."
  It's just such a bad argument. Fact of the matter is, is that if there were a non-hacky as shit way to do what Ventoy does, it would be available right now. But it's not... Because it's really not.
  The only way to avoid the issues that Ventoy employs is to not use ISOs and use something like netboot.xyz, which presents its own set of issues. How do you know you're not being MITM from the iPXE environment? Like, sure. You can technically verify it, but how do you know for sure on the fly?
  Like, if you sit down you can pick apart any software for being an insufferable gaping asshole of security vulnerabilities.
  
  The problem with Ventoy isn't the ISOs.
  The problem is they use binary versions of core tools like cryptsetup in their source tree, vs compiling them at build time.
  This leaves the door open to supply-chain attacks. I.E. a PR with a bad cryptsetup binary, or an attack on crypt that makes its way downstream with no way to audit. This is how huge software distributions make their way to Wikipedia in a bad way: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
  The solution is the build those binaries at build time, which a fork is working on.
  @Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- I read what sounded like an intelligent follow-up on this subject. But I’m not smart enough to verify for myself, so I still refrain from using ventoy - even though I’d love to start using it again.
  It was basically “wacky code from all over the place, poor coding practices, can’t find anything bad, but methods used are sus af”
  Says one dude I read on the internet :/
  
  That's it.
  Sounds like a Chinese geek tried to make something useful, did a lot of dirty hacks to get it going.
  And couldn't properly explain because his social skills and English weren't great.
  The blobs weren't super suspicious, just some gpld tools, basically busybox kind of stuff.
  The real problem is what he made was so fucking insanely useful and needed by everyone that the standards for software skyrocketed.
  Like you make a cure for cancer and everyone starts screaming at you because one of the side effects is temporary impotence.
- Just have 500 thinkpads and you can avoid security issues all together! A thinkpad for every distro EZEZ

My 77 year old mother-in-law runs Pop cause of me and loves it.
- My parents love Bazzite.
  Is Pop as good and generally user friendly for those less familiar with Linux? Never heard of Pop before!
  
  PopOS is great, the installation process is like 5minutes, with 4 minutes being the download and boot from USB. From there on you click "next" 5 times and are rebooting into a working system.
  To be absolutely honest, I had to do some googling and command line stuff to get my fingerprint reader in the laptop working but that was the only thing that needed any attention. But I never did a Windows install where I didnt have to configure at least 2-3 drivers, so I consider it a draw.
  From there one it is the typical stuff: You need one proprietary software? You have to figure it out for hours how to get it to work. You are fine with open source options? Go enjoy a blazing fast ad-free non intrusive non annoying OS. For me the trade of is worth it. Been using Linux since I was 14, if I could do it from my kids room with parents switching of WLAN after 22:00 you can do it too.
  
  Why Bazzite for a non-gaming setup? Or are your parents gamers?
  
  Yeah it's a very good overall distro. Things work well and it's familiar enough to pick up and use.
- Best I can do is 60 year old dad on Mint XFCE on a massive Phenom II x4 955. Salvaged from my first PC build.
  
  Hey of it works for your pop and you keep stuff out of a landfill I say that's a solid win.
- Good for her
  Just make sure you respect the wishes of the people around you. It is not ok to force someone to use Linux because you think its a good idea. You don't get to take advantage of people to push your own agenda. Windows is going to be ideal for most people simply because it is widely supported.
  
  Most sane people wouldn't bring their some brand car to another brand car mechanic and expect service though, unfortunately most people are not that sane when it comes to it.
  No linux? No free support from your frienfly neighborhood technician.
  Oh Windows? Yeah that'll cost..
  
  How is me "forcing" somehow worse than Microsoft actually forcing people to use their ad-pushing, data mining spyware of an operating system? My "agenda" is simplifying an elderly person's computing experience, protecting her from phishing/scams and allowing her the freedom of not having to worry about one other thing.
  Weird take, bud.

Just install Linux Mint, they'll never find out.
- As a fresh convert not having my .exes work would be sus. But with MS locking more and more stuff in their app store, we're not too far from a full-on windows troll distro.
  
  Should mostly work through WINE and Proton?
  
  It will obviously look different, but with binfmt, wine, and a sane initial setup, you could get a lot of .exe works from a click in the UI (or the CLI, after all, CLI apps exists on windows too).
- or something with plasma
- Don't actually do this as it is problematic. You should respect there wishes instead of trying to force Linux apron them. They don't really need to know that Linux exists at all.
  The other issue is that you instantly become the sole source of tech support.
  
  I've done it to my family and friends over a decade ago.
  Free tech support is for foss!

Ventoy is completely insane in terms of how it works fwiw: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/custom-nixos-installer-plug-install-play-how-to-achieve-this/61710/13
- Thanks for the extra info and thanks for this useful nixos discourse post!
  
  NixOS ftw (I use NixOS btw)

Your father gave me his USB stick in Vietnam, son.
- where did you keep it?
  
  I carried this uncomfortable hunk of data up my ass for two years. And now little man, I give it to you.

118 ISOs, and windows ain't one

Installing Linux on your buttplug is a bold move, I say.

Just say youre installing wimdows 13

I'm just going to start pretending I know nothing about computers
- "Sorry I got rid of windows 10 years ago. I can help you install win 7 but nothing newer than that"
  
  Please at least (or, well, at most) make it 8.1...
  
  Sorry I'm not tech savvy
  "Don't you work in IT?"
  Umm.... I'm bad at my job
- A computer? Ahh yes, a person performing mathematical calculations! Likewise. (^-)/
- I just pretend I can’t speak English.
- That's a good idea as that's how you avoid being tech support for family

Dude: "Damn... I really want to be able to see the inside of my computer. Why won't anyone help me install windows to the case?"

Is it mandatory to have in your ass or can you just put it in your pocket?

Got my parents a new computer for Christmas. I didn't feel like acting as their 24/7 tech support so I let it with the Windows 11 that it came with. Yesterday they couldn't get their webcam and microphone to work at all for our weekly family videocall. We ended up having the videocall on Signal. I believe they would face less troubles with Debian at this point.

Hey if you don’t know how to do it just say so
- I'm shy. ┐('～`;)┌

I'm the family computer guy but dad's probably better at Windows than me.

Shoutout to Medicat toolkit. Takes ventoy to next level.

Too bad my usb stick can only store one distro at a time.

Tough love is the realest love

If you’re incapable of figuring out how to install Windows then you’re probably incapable of most things in life.
- I am not incapable, I just don't want to.
- To be fair, Windows wasn’t meant to be installed by the end user that often. It comes preinstalled.
  
  Just saying that it’s brain dead easy to install. You don’t need any technical skill at all.
  There are no tricks. Just mouse through a couple of prompts and it’s done.
  I’ve installed Linux just as many times as windows and these days Linux is more complicated to set up and install than windows.
  Like I get it. Yall have a deep bias for Linux but Jesus Christ can you at least be accurate?
- I think without instructions most people would need help due to not knowing what a partition is. So depending on your interpretation of incapable this seems like a huge exaggeration. The Linux installers with GUIs I've seen at least explained how to set them up.
- Most people would rather go to the store and get a new computer, than go to a webpage and download an iso. They can figure it out. They are just lazy and have little motivation to try it. They also want what they already know, with as little change as possible.
- Windows isn't hard to install but it does require some computer knowledge

I wouldn't provide tech support unless you have a very good reason. You also want Windows as that's what everyone knows. Stick to the beaten path when you can unless you have a very good reason to stray.