Re: [PLUG] Off-Topic Rant: Windows Install Really %%&**&#$

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2015 at 10:18 PM, Casey Bralla <MailList@nerdworld.org> wrote:
>
> The install went along fine until we got to entering the activation code. I
> could not get it to accept the activation code (which was 100% legit). Some
> googling revealed that this is because I did a clean install. Even though it
> was never mentioned on the New Egg product page, ya gotta have an old
> version of windows already on the machine before you can install Win 10 from
> this disk.
>

Amazing.  They give it away for free to anybody who can manage to
activate a cracked version of 7, and you paid $100 for it, and they
still put you through the ringer.

My general observation is that MS makes it really hard to buy Windows
in general.  I suppose there is a simple solution for that...

> Heck, I could even have had Gentoo installed, recompiled, and at a text prompt by now.

Actually, getting Gentoo to a text prompt these days (after a reboot)
isn't that much more work than getting Arch to the same state.  Nobody
does stage1 installs any longer - a stage3 install gives you a working
chroot with a minimal distro in as much time as it takes you to
extract the tarball.  Then you need to build a kernel and install
grub, but that is only about 10min or so depending on your CPU.  I can
get a Gentoo container (no kernel/grub) running in minutes, and would
have it faster if I did it often enough to want to bother scripting
it.  Oh, I guess if you want to use a sane PID 1 implementation that
takes a few minutes to build because it still isn't the default.  ;)

Now, if you want to tweak your USE flags and rebuild the system set
that will take longer - probably a few hours, but there is no rush to
do something like that.  The system is fully functional while it is
rebuilding if you go that route, which is why everybody uses the
stage3 approach now.

Now, if you want KDE/Gnome then you're probably looking at a few hours
of building before you can look at something other than bash.  But,
again bash itself is fully functional the entire time.

--
Rich
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