The one I came across had something to do with…you remember Intel Optane? How there was a brief window there where they’d sell you a PC with a spinning rust hard disk and like a 16GB special NVMe drive that acted as a kind of cache for the hard disk? I was replacing that with just a normal NVMe drive, and there’s some settings in the BIOS you have to tinker with. And BIOS settings are bullshit. TMP. XMPP. FLP. TLQ. DKR or LXD. Which combination of these settings means “no more optane, just normal bulk storage on the NVMe socket?” There’s nothing that says anything like that.

I apparently didn’t get this quite right and Windows would get a ways through the install process before failing with an 0x2ac4d7f9f2 code or something. Windows’ installer doesn’t give you a functioning desktop, it’s in its own useless environment, so you have to manually type this into your phone to look it up, which returns no results. Like it doesn’t link to a page on Microsoft’s website because of course it doesn’t.

I then tried to install Linux Mint. Boots to the live environment, I get a full desktop. I run the installer, which fails partway through. The error message spells out the issue in plain English, contains a clickable hyperlink to a relevant wiki page which launches in Firefox because we’re in a live environment, and it has a QR code you can scan with your phone to go to the same page on a smart phone. Armed with this knowledge I got the setting right in the BIOS and successfully installed Linux.

But Windows is just so much more user friendly you guys.