I tried both Flyby11 and Rufus to install it as an upgrade and the installation would fail on the final restart. So I bit the bullet and did a clean installation using Rufus. This worked the first time and was quicker.

One issue I had is that I could not access a NAS running on a Raspberry Pi 4 on my network. My mini-PC running Windows 11 Pro accesses it fine. After hours of research and trying "sure fixes" I found that Windows has changed an obscure permission so that it always requires digital signing of communications with SMB servers. Once I disabled that I could connect. Windows seems to go out of it's way to defeat people who want to use other devices on their networks.

I can imagine the frustration of someone who bought a commercial NAS (network addressable storage) that runs Linux only to find it will not connect to their PC.

... for the way MS is handling the roll out of Windows 11. People used to upgrade PC's every 5 years or so because everything improved so much it was desirable to get the latest technology. Now that Moore's law is pretty much broken the new hardware just doesn't offer as much of a performance upgrade.

MS gets a cut on every single PC sold. The get their cut cot only from the OS license but from new subscriptions to Office 365. A lot of people with older PC's like me have older paid for copies of Office that work perfectly well. MS wants us to trash those and become annual subscribers Office. It is also another chance for Edge to take over as their default browser.

I use the rotuer supplied by Quantum fiber. No VPN or anything complex.

Windows 11 runs great on it.

Download Windows 11 ISO here.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11

Download Rufus from here.
https://rufus.ie/en/
To create USB installation media.

After installation, use massgrave to activate Windows 11 to pro or whatever edition you like.

Last edited Mon Jan 6, 2025, 08:14 AM - Edit history (1)

I found another way around it. I downloaded the Media Creation Tool and chose the option to download the ISO file. That worked. I am installing Windows 11 right now. I will report back when it is done. This is a 14 year old HP quad core PC.

So I went back and tried the download link again and it seems to be fixed now.

I am using a script called FlyBy11. You don't need a USB stick or anything. It will download the ISO file and mount it for you then run the installation w/o the hardware and secure boot options. Just Google FlyBy11.

Edit: I understand that Windows 11 24H2 will not run on a dual core PC under any circumstances so be careful if your PC is really old say from before 2010. You can go to Settings>System>About to check your hardware and version of Windows.

I see It's used to do upgrades, I never do upgrades anymore, I always do clean installs.

I wasted several hours trying to upgrade a laptop.

I just clicked on it and I am getting the error message that prevents me from downloading the ISO file.

Last edited Wed Jan 1, 2025, 09:08 PM - Edit history (2)

I could not get W11 to install on my 2013 vintage HP laptop. It failed during the 2nd boot and reverted to Windows 10. I tried several times. I will probably have to do a clean install on that one. I have to back up my data first.

Thanks for the mention of massgrave.

Just the name to get you there. 😉

Rufus is a really good app, you should check it out.

You should also spend some time sailing the high seas.

Reddit is a good start. 😉

I have gone back and checked several times and the download iso file option is working fine.

It has been enjoyable making these older PC's more usable. I like both Windows 11 and Linux Mint. I have learned a lot from the experience. Thank you all for the comments and suggestions. You have been most helpful.

Tiny11 is a modded version of Windows 11 designed to take up as little storage space as possible.

I haven't actually installed it but I did install Tiny 10 on a low spec laptop for a friend and it works like a dream. Very economical on space and no bloated MS stuff.

I have a copy here, just waiting for some time to install on my spare laptop.

https://www.techspot.com/downloads/7578-tiny11.html

I am not fond of third party sites to download Windows though. I think my next project is to install Windows 11 on a 2013 vintage HP laptop. I should have enough disk space for the full version.

I took 2 tries. It had a hardware crash the first time. I have had this happen before on updates. There is something particular to this PC that causes that. Now on Windows 11.

You say you are Progressives but you continue using products from a company that DOES NOT have your interests in mind when they design Windows.

For example
A recent customer asked me to assist them in transferring their data from an older Windows 10 system. Normally a simple process that in this case was turned into a time consuming mess because Microsoft has apparently mandated a supposed security solution called Bitlocker to "protect" us all from the bad guys. In reality its another method to lock customers into the Windows platform and control them while using it.

When I hooked up their new system to a different keyboard, mouse and monitor and dared to use a flash drive in this system Bitlocker locked the drive and would not allow access until I went through a time consuming process of retrieving a "key" from Microsoft. This involved getting login info from the customer for their Microsoft account and wading through a time consuming hassle to get the key so the customer could actually use the computer they paid for.

This is beyond just being consumer unfriendly, this is ruthless monopolistic behavior by a out of control corporation.

STOP using products from Microsoft and Apple. Make the effort to switch to Linux. Most of you have zero need to use Windows and would be fine using some version of Linux. You don't NEED Windows.

I've got all my favorite computers, going back to the 'seventies, emulated on my Linux desktop. Transferring all my programs and data, about fifty years of it now, to a newer computer is easy. It doesn't cost anything, there are no registration hassles, no sketchy "helper" software needed... It just works.

I keep numerous backup drives and that's easy to do with Linux too. Seeing homes and businesses I visited frequently as a child and young adult in Los Angeles incinerated reminds me how important it is to back up my computers.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/07/linus-torvalds-microsoft-hatred-is-a-disease/

Last week, Microsoft contributed Hyper-V drivers to the Linux kernel in order to improve the performance of running virtualized Linux guests in a Windows host environment. Furthermore, Microsoft opened its Linux Hyper-V drivers under the GPL. There was a lot of controversy within the OSS community about Microsoft's motives and opinions varied tremendously. Some thought Microsoft was finally changing its ways and others suggested the whole thing was all a marketing ploy to sell more licenses of the Hyper-V virtualization solution.

Nevertheless, one person's opinion on the matter is worth quoting. Linus Torvalds, the man who initiated the development of the Linux kernel, hasn't yet looked at the code but did give an interesting statement to Linux Mag:

Everything doesn't have to be Microsoft.

My favorite computers of all time were the Atari 8 bits.

I tried Linux a number of years ago but the PC was older and really not adequate to properly run anything. I run a Raspberry Pi to function as a NAS and put my weather station on the internet so I have some experience with Linux. I might put Mint on a spare desktop that I have to try it out.

I started using Linux in the 90's when it was harder to setup and use. These days it's pretty easy. If you use Firefox, Google Chrome, LibreOffice, Thunderbird and numerous other cross platform applications its not going to be much different from running Windows. There's thousands of other applications available as well. If you really needed to use a Windows application you could install a copy of Virtualbox and use it to install a copy of Windows for that one application. There are plenty of old copies of Windows out there for next to no cost. Supported printers are a breeze to setup also. Most devices are supported. I rarely run into an unsupported device anymore.
The big plus is you'll be using an actual free (as in Freedom) operating system that respects users rights. Microsoft and Apple have long forgotten the need to take care of users right. Its all about them these days.

I have an older desktop that I do not use any more. It was my test machine to try the Windows 11 upgrade on very not supported hardware. It's a good machine for testing. I upgraded it to a 500 GB SSD for the OS and use the original two 500 GB E/M drives in a RAID 1 array for data. I have a current backup for everything also.

you get to the point of partitioning your system.

Windows doesn't support much flexibility with regards to partitioning or at least didn't the last time I installed it.
Linux is very flexible in this area.

Rather than using automatic partitioning I always use manual partitioning. I generally go with the following basic idea.
/ (150 to 200 gbs)
swap (14 to 20 gbs)
/home (the entire rest of the drive)

If you're using UEFI you'll have to modify that to adjust that for the extra partition it needs. I normally don't use UEFI and disable it if possible.

To understand the partition terms above:

/ = the root drive. This is somewhat equivalent to the C: drive in Windows. For instance where program files, Windows etc. reside.

swap = A simulated memory area created on your hard drive to give the system a bit of memory overhead when it runs low on conventional memory. Windows has a similar function but it creates it on the fly on the C: drive rather than dedicating an actual partition to it.

/home = All of the user data. Similar to the C:users directory in Windows.

This is a very simple partition scheme. Linux can get much more complicated. I just haven't had the need to go there.

Why this works well is that it leaves open the door to reloading your system without losing your data. Should the need to reload occur you once again choose manual partitioning during install but this time you choose to NOT format the /home partition and only format the / partition. This leaves your user data completely intact and immediately available after reload. During reload you set up the same username and password. You'll be able to log in to your original user directory after reload.

I would suggest doing several experiments when you first start playing with Linux versions especially since you are using the raid setup.

If you have any questions let me know.

A great website for discovering all the variety in Linux versions. https://www.distrowatch.com

Thanks for the offer to help.

I installed Linux Mint and used the entire space on my SSD. I had to be careful because the default installation drive was my RAID array. LOL That would have been bad.

Looks nice and I will figure my way around. I already have my network drive mounted and open. It took me hours to get Windows 11 to do that on my laptop. I can read all the Windows app files on my data drive. The printer setup worked fine but I haven't tested it yet. I am setting up Thunderbird email right now.

One good test will be to see if it crashes randomly on restarts. This PC did that on Windows 10 and Windows 11. It was an ugly blue screen crash too.I could never figure it out. I suspected a driver issue but I tried updating all the drivers and the HP Bios. If Linux fixes that I will probably keep it. I was always leery that one day Windows would not be able to recover from that crash.

Linux on the desktop is garbage.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

.....you figure it out.

Linux Master Race

Right away you can eliminate well over 90% of the users from ever switching to something else. They don't have the skills to do that. Chromebook users aren't switching to Linux or Windows for the same reason. I have the skill to install Linux but I was not motivated when I had to use Windows on my work computer to run software that would only run on Windows.

Now that I am retired I have the time to try Linux on a PC I never use. From just a couple of hours of use I think it has come a long way from what it was many years ago.

Until something happens to break Microsoft dominance of the new PC market I do not see a huge switch to Linux or any other OS..

Give it some time, I have no doubt you'll grow frustrated with it, as most people do.

Millions of people in this country still believe that Trump is a great president. Do you agree with them?

I quit using Linux on the desktop way back in 2007 after years of use, at that time the Linux worldwide market share was at about 9%.

Currently the market share for Linux is at about 4%. Linux is free to download and install on your computer, but yet the market share for Linux on the desktop continues to freefall.



At the age of 65, I am also retired, but I have better things to do than to waste my time beta testing Linux Distro's.

Good luck.

I would say the installation and set up of Linux Mint was remarkably easy. I have all the basic things set up. Email accounts are working and I have Firefox and Libre Office also. I recall from before my frustration with Linux was that things that were remarkably easy to do in Windows were just a pain in the ass to do in Linux, like setting up printers for example. That's not the case now.

I am struggling a bit with permissions and sharing. I am trying to share my data drive to a couple of Windows PC's. I figured out I had to install SMB and create a separate user name and password for SMB. I was able to access the dive from a Windows 10 PC but not one running Windows 11. That was after I had trouble even seeing the Linux PC in Network on the Windows PC's. I think I am going to try using the command line to set up the share in SMB next. The problem could well be on the Windows side too.

The good news is that I am not getting blue screen crashes on reboots now at least so far. In Windows I got those on almost every second or third reboot. This problem goes back a few years too. I remember it crashed twice during the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and I thought I would have to wipe everything and do a clean install. Linux has rebooted w/o issue at least a dozen times.

No reboots since the last time I went poking around inside it. It draws a minuscule amount of power in sleep mode and it's attached to a UPS.

The only time I reboot my computers is when they've been powered down while I work inside them.

I haven't had any occasion to use a Windows machine since the beginning of the Covid epidemic. As I recall I was frequently forced to reboot Windows machines for some damned reason or another.

All of a sudden my external USB WiFi adapter isn't working. I manually added my SSID and password and it is still not working.

I am working through a couple of hardware issues:

1. My USB WiFi dongle that worked after installation quit working.
2. My USB keyboard started being very slow to work on restarts. It takes up to 30 seconds to be detected.

I unplugged the non-working USB WiFi dongle and magically the keyboard now works correctly. I assume the WiFi dongle was causing a problem on the entire USB bus.

USB WiFi adapters that are supported with Linux in-kernel drivers

Short list:

https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/blob/main/home/The_Short_List.md

Long list:

https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/blob/main/home/USB_WiFi_Adapters_that_are_supported_with_Linux_in-kernel_drivers.md

I refurbish e-waste computers for fun so I keep a few Panda Wireless PAU0A wifi adapters and similar brands that "just work"in my desk drawer.

If a computer has it, I'll usually try to get its internal wi-fi working if I can. This has, at times, been an adventure.

I'd also check if the USB port itself is physically sound.

It is not on the list you posted but Cody had a driver for Linux on their web site. I will probably have to install that if it does not work out of the box.

Cody uses the Realtek RTL8811CU chip.

I think it would have worked out of the box but I installed the driver anyway. I like how it works. It shows the signal strength of the WiFi networks in %.