How very Microsoft of them! All the more reason to scrub it I guess

If you want the absolute easiest install possible, don’t need to dual boot, and don’t care to do a ton of gaming, Linux Mint is, in my opinion, honestly easier than installing windows. The most confusing part is typically the partition manager, but Mint has an Easy option that handles that for you as long as you’re okay with wiping your drive and starting fresh. Otherwise you’ll need to read up a bit on the partition manager on order to dual boot, but that’s the only difficult part.

Download Ventoy, use that to put the Mint installer on a thumb drive, and follow the instructions on booting to USB for your motherboard. From there it walks you through everything.

*Edit: if gaming is important, bazzite is almost as easy…

Oh damn lol that was some serious commitment to the bit

You think one of the most popular and best-rated games of 2025 “did poorly?”