I’ve seen the Linux version of this quote stated so many times, that after quite a while of using both systems, I have to make a few points.

Origins of the quote

But first, I tried to locate the origin of this quote, and it seems quite difficult. My speculations for now are that Mental Outlaw[a], popularized the current full phrase, however from looking through a few search pages, I found that a certain Jamie Zawinski mentioned this on his blog[b] (which I recommend the odd peek around in, it’s one of those old internet rabbit hole sites). The post is a transcript from a 1998 interview, which puts it well before any other listing of the phrase.

[a]

[b]

If this is true then the original form would be:

> Linux is only free if your time has no value

which I’ve also heard used a few times, so that’s a fine enough origin by me.

Installation shenanigans

I’ve lost two weekends to trying to install Windows. And I do mean just installing, I had the installation media and everything prepared, stuck it in and the installer wouldn’t consider my pc Win11 ready.

Even though Win11 was literally installed on there a few months prior.

I got quite confused, checked tpm in the bios, seemed correct, in the end I just gave up and created a Win10 boot drive, from a laptop that I had to borrow. Since for whatever reason it doesn’t boot if I just flash an ISO from any ol’ pc, I have to use the media creation tool from a Win10 device.

And the installer crashed, on the last step once it got to 100%, of course. This made the iteration time between attempts basically the slowest it could be.

Something in the back of my mind kept telling me Windows really didn’t like multiple disks, but I sadly dismissed that for a while longer. I stumbled around the forums, which basically told me to try turning it off and on again, not literally of course, but a similar level of helpfulness. What infuriated me quite a lot was that every accepted answer was prefixed by,

> Hello, I am a 3 times Microsoft MVP, engineer, receiver of the … award …

It was extremely surreal to read.

If I compare it to the support I get on the Linux IRC channels, it’s what we’d call “Nebe a dudy”, literally czech for “Heaven and bagpipes”.

To say it’s all bad would of course be dishonest and untrue, there’s a bunch of great people, just that this train of threads happened to lead through the information-wise worse parts, but check out The old new thing[a], a blog from Raymond Chen who seems to always have well worded, interesting and informative posts and answers, many thanks to him.

[a]

In the end none of it helped and I decided to take apart the tower and disconnect all the drives save for one I’m installing to, and that actually solved it.

But how can an OS that’s so praised not be able to handle an extra disk or two, it wasn’t even anything special just two extra old HDDs.

After the installation I could immediately upgrade to Win11, so why did the installer tell me I couldn’t????

Also, the installer isn’t the only one that deemed it incompatible. Microsoft actually has two programs that can tell you if your machine is ready or not, and I kid you not, had them side by side and each gave me a different answer.

EFI Breakage

Much later, I was going through some data cleanup and deleted an old debian system and boot partition… and it turns out we had a squatter in there. Windows just decided to move in, mind you, this is on a completely separate disk. There’s one disk that houses the Windows boot, system, data and whatever else MS puts there. And another that had random ext4 and btrfs, along with some linux installs and their EFIs.

I know people mention that there should only be one EFI, but until then it all worked perfectly, each system had its own box and both the DELL Inspiron and Aorus Bioses have an option where I could choose which to boot from. In addition I never experienced Windows messing up my other boots which I heard tales of, so I assumed this was protecting me.

So anyways, I deleted a random partition which Win decided to put stuff on, probably my fault for not checking but still more precious seconds I subtract from their side of the clock.

The 12 minute Morrowind Speedrun

The day after I discovered that my cleanup prevented me from booting, a message came in from a friend group asking if we wanna play Morrowind together. And I kinda started to get nervous as I saw the rest of the group accept the offer.

Well, what can I do, Windows was down, I deleted debian and Fedora was also out of commision for … reasons I don’t remember.

So, I replied, I’d be ready as soon as possible gimme up to 30 minutes (I started a timer out of curiosity at that point), and I shoved the stick in.

Did I mention I was hosting?

Yeah, so, I timed it and:

installing the OS

setting up networking

mounting the partition where the game and server data was

running the server

installing and hooking up the VPN we used to connect

running the game and connecting to the server

took just under 12 minutes.

We had a blast that day, and I was pretty happy about it. I didn’t really feel valuable time getting drained.

Conclusion

I have more little stories about how Windows wasted my time, but imma leave it here, because I don’t want to just spew pointless negativity. If you feel like I misrepresented the issues feel free to send me a complaint.

The thing is, I’m pretty sure somebody who poweruses Windows would perhaps be able to do the same thing.

The quote is two things, firstly it’s historical, from quite a long time ago in modern IT time, back when Linux was indeed young and very imperfect and installing an OS required extensive knowledge, it was perfectly justified as far as I can tell (can’t be sure, wasn’t alive back then). Secondly it comes from the people that go fool around with linux for a bit and then hear the quote, which now, makes perfect sense to them, since of course it takes a long time to get something done when you have no experience with the given tool. And as most people first learn Windows and then Linux afterwards that feeling is significantly one sided. After years of using this great tool named Linux I get faster and faster, since I don’t have to look that much up and I’m already just used to where everything is and how it all interacts. Of course this is starting to make me significantly slower at using Windows, as with any tool the speed and elegance of use depends significantly on the wielder.