1- linux 10 years ago and now are completely different beasts; I’m mainly referring to issues with making drivers work. if you have vanilla hardware, boot off a liveUSB stick and the vast majority of stuff just works.

2- you are absolutely on point on linux being noob-adverse and its users (although predominantly well-intentioned) can’t relate to people who aren’t into complex setup, shell commands and such.

3- you’d do well to steer clear of unconventional distros and stick to the middle of the road solutions, which is, and for the foreseeable future will be, Ubuntu. once everything works and you’re satisfied with the functionality, you’re free to distro-hop and switch DEs and whatnot.

4- steer clear from multi-booting different OS, that’s an advanced user scenario, and like with choosing your distro you need the vanillaest possible scenario - one disk, whole disk, nothing else.

I appreciate that funds might be tight, but a new SSD is under $20, used ones even less than that. disconnect all your existing drives (so you have a fallback solution), connect the new drive, install to it using the whole drive. your experience will change dramatically, we’re talking like 20x faster; making stuff work on a slow-as-molasses USB stick is just a horror scenario.

5- if you want concrete advice, instead of general observations, include your hardware - CPU, graphics, storage; some things are easier, some not, some are not even worth trying.

hang in there.

I’m not sure who told you that an installation on a USB thumb drive should boot “almost instantly” - that’s a much slower device than a proper HDD or SSD, and it’s normal for booting off of those to at least take a bit of time. The slow boot and the slow performance when running are probably both the same thing - slow disk I/O. A fast CPU helps run computations quickly, but installing and launching programs involves a lot of writing and reading files, which doesn’t have much to do with CPU speed.

Things that will make Linux more frustrating to test:
Laptops with dgpus, Desktops with Nvidia dgpus (though there are distros that solve that out of the box such as the https://nobaraproject.org/ created by the GloriousEggroll himself), Software inflexibility.
Personally I build my machines with AMD CPU and GPU to make linux sailing a bit more smooth.

If your main software applications won’t work in Linux and there are no substitutes available that are good enough then you will have a bad time trying Linux. It’s like having a screwdriver without torx bits when all you use is torx screws.

OOBE\Bypassnro:
That said, if your Windows-only need is running peripheral apps to configure them then a refurbished Windows 11 Pro PC (desktop or laptop) that you keep disconnected will do it for you. The last saved configuration profile is (almost) always stored in the peripheral itself.
The trick is to:
a) not connect it to the network when it asks for it and,
b) Press Shift+F10 and run the bypassnro script in the oobe directory. (OOBE\Bypassnro)
The Windows out of the box experience will restart and the network requirement will be gone, you can now install with a local user instead of a microsoft account.
It will still spy on you whenever you connect it to the network, but you don’t have to connect it now do you?

Things that make the experience hell even when you get it running:
Guides tricking people into running a full OS on an old USB-A Thumb Drive that doesn’t have the IO to handle it.

My recommendation:
Buy a refurbished Lenovo T14s Gen2 or Gen3 with AMD, such as https://www.target.com/p/lenovo-thinkpad-t14s-g2-14-laptop-amd-ryzen-5-16gb-ram-256gb-ssd-w11p-manufacturer-refurbished/-/A-93371454.
Try any and all distros you are curious about until you find one you wouldn’t mind running as your main OS.

Then either go Windows 11 Pro on your laptop again and run your linux distro of choice on the desktop,
or use the desktop as a pure gaming machine and do your privacy conscious stuff on the linux laptop.
If you love competitive online FPS games with kernel level anticheat then you’re stuck with the second option.
A third option is to refuse software that only works in Windows and go full Linux on your machines, but I understand that isn’t a reasonable option for everyone.

Holy stream of consciousness rant

It sounds to me like you have been very unlucky with unsupported hardware, based on your network, sound, and graphics issues. Back in 2013-2014 this was a common problem, and while amazing progress has been made to bring support to much more hardware since then, unfortunately there are still some brands and models that are notorious for not having support. I’ve just learned to avoid these brands and do some quick research to see if hardware has mainline kernel support or if the manufacturer offers a Linux driver, before I purchase it.

I think another problem is that you are probably making things more complicated and less ideal by trying to run from a USB. Booting from a USB will be the opposite of instant. Booting and running programs will be VERY slow, because USB drives are not as fast as a proper hard drive, and it will take more time to load the system and programs into memory, as well as read and write persistent files. This will affect the system performance across the board, no matter how fast your CPU is.

Another issue is that you are trying to run an application for an operating system that is not the OS you are using. Again, amazing progress has been made over the past 10 years on compatibility layers and containers in order to run Windows programs on Linux, BUT it’s not always going to work for every Windows program. I’m not really familiar with the program you are trying to run. I think maybe the easiest path forward for this would be to look into running a Windows virtual machine.

When you keep getting the same responses and advice, I understand dismissing it as just people touting “their way” and “their distro”, but also, you have to consider that maybe there is a reason you hear this advice over and over. And remember that many many people, and the people offering this advice, are running Linux without these problems and completing all of their typical computing workflows with it, from gaming to productivity and development to running highly stable servers.

When following guides, you will need to tailor and customize commands to fit your exact situation, for example with your sudo mount /dev/sdc command, your drive may be named differently in your system, it could be /dev/sdb or /dev/sdd instead depending on the number of drives detected by the system, or something completely different depending on the kind of drive it is. Many commands you can expect to copy and paste directly, some you need to change to fit your system, and there is a learning curve to understanding when that is the case and how to make the required adjustments. There are a lot of poor quality guides out there that might not make this apparent.

You’re using an operating system that you do not seem super familiar with, and you are trying to do things with it that are not really a typical or standard use case for it, so I think it should be expected that it will be a learning experience with potential issues to overcome along the way.

Is there an alternative program for Linux that does the same thing as the one you need to run?

I HATED it. The other thing besides my IMMEDIATE hatred for it, was the fact that it didn’t work. I couldn’t get the internet, or sound, or bluetooth, or a lot of things working.

If Ubuntu doesn’t work, nothing else will. It means your hardware is unsupported on Linux because of the manufacturer not caring enough to add the support.

And then it took roughly 30 minutes to boot. I googled it, and it should only take 15-20 minutes to install, and boot almost instantly.

I think it’s because your PC has USB 2.0 ports which are like 20x slower than the newer ones. The guides are usually made for beefy new machines that only like 1.5% of people can realistically afford.

The hardware shouldn’t be an issue. Especially since supposedly Zorin 17 only needs 1.5ghz, duel core, and I have 4 core 3.75ghz. Every spec they listed as needed for Zorin I easily have double.

There’s much more to it. As I already mentioned, some certain hardware is not supported on Linux because of missing manufacturer drivers for it.

Also I’m very sorry for the amount of toxic behavior you see in the Linux community. Going to Lemmy will probably make it even worse. Unfortunately it’s just how it is. It has some stuff to do with the demographics of the Linux community but that’s another story.

8BitDo Ultimate Software V2

There’s no way this app runs on Linux under Wine, because Wine can’t do direct USB yet, and also if the key mappings rely on a Windows driver to do that, that obviously won’t work either.

Pretty sure there’s pretty decent apps that can do similar things on Linux.

And when I was going to the library, asking questions online, and then printing the answers a week later, everyone was saying “Oh, try these other disros…”

It is ASTOUNDING to me how linux users think. The answer to every problem someone else is facing is “Your way is stupid, that’s why it doesn’t work. Do it MY way, on MY distros”

So, this isn’t a very fun advice, but a big part of a Linux distro is changing your starting configuration and dependencies and everything. So it is true that changing your distro can make a whole bunch of things work out of the box that didn’t before, especially if it’s a weird distro. Now, can you make it work on any distro? Also yes, but it’s more effort, and if you’re printing help at a library, yeah it might be a better choice to just try a bunch of distros and at least try to find the one that gets you on the Internet out of the box. Bazzite for example literally ships with Steam, Wine, and a whole bunch of gaming utilities out of the box, so for a gamer that means more stuff works out of the box, and that’s great if you hate tinkering.

There’s a lot of complicated legal and philosophical stuff in the Linux world where some drivers are either not shipped by default because it’s proprietary and it makes puritans angry, or legally, the firmware just cannot be distributed by the distro.

And sometimes, you really just don’t vibe with the distro. Ubuntu has a way of doing things, so if you hated Ubuntu (2013 would put you in the Unity era which was pretty terrible, it was wildly hated for that reason). Fedora has a different way of doing things. Mint takes a bunch of stuff people hate with Ubuntu and fixes it. Pop_OS takes stuff they hate from Ubuntu and fix it. If you hated Ubuntu, why bother trying to fix it?

And when picking niche distros like Zorin you also significantly reduce you help pool, because it’s not that popular so people don’t know how it works. You ask me something about Void Linux and I’m gonna be like, I don’t know man, I have no idea how to solve you problem on that distro. But I do know how on Arch and Debian based distros. Niche distros are sharp double-edged sword: it can be very nice because it lines up exactly with what you want, or you could be fighting endlessly with the distro because you’re trying to do the polar opposite of what it wants you to do.

You can go beyond that obviously, Linux is endlessly customizable, but that takes experience and skill with Linux to do successfully because it might involve compiling stuff from source and whatnot. It’s not hard, but it does come with a lot of pitfalls on its own.

Everything went fine until the actual install at 5:59 of the video. At 6:00 he jump cuts to after the installation. The installation itself took roughly 5 hours.

And then it took roughly 30 minutes to boot. I googled it, and it should only take 15-20 minutes to install, and boot almost instantly.

What’s the performance of your USB stick? You can check with utilities like CrystalDiskMark on Windows, so you get the Windows numbers. My guess is your USB stick is a USB 2.0 stick and is horribly slow at anything other than bulk file reading and writing. That could explain why it was so bad and that’d make it not Linux’s fault. The live USB would decompress into RAM, so it’s faster because it’s compressed (less data to read), and the data is then in RAM where it’s very very fast to access.

I actually had the same issue but in reverse: I needed to run motherboard software just once on Windows to configure a few features once forever. I installed it on the only USB stick I had, a 32GB Verbatim from Microcenter. It took hours to install, a solid half an hour to make it to the Windows desktop, and probably like an hour to manage to open up Edge, download the software, install it and run it. It was absolutely horrible.

I tried sudo mount /dev/sdc/ but terminal spit out an error.

That’s not a valid command because /dev/sdc/ isn’t a folder, it’s a device file. It probably would have worked with sudo mount /dev/sdc, without the trailing /. But that still would only work if the drive is listed in /etc/fstab as to where it should be mounted. You ideally want sudo mount /dev/sdc /some/other/path so it ends up mounted where you want it. Or just mount it from the file manager which will do it for you in a temporary location.

I don’t really have better advice for you and Linux. For some people it just works out of the box, some other people have more annoying hardware that’s a pain to get working. With the attitude you have, you don’t seem like you want to take the time to learn how Linux works and get used to it, so you end up frustrated and you just go nowhere. Sometimes it really just takes persistence to get through it.

You’re not helping yourself at all doing weird setups like temporarily installing it on a USB stick. As I said in my other comment, you started off with an impossible task (that app will not work in Wine), so you’re also thrown into a rabbit hole of commands and troubleshooting that has no chance of succeeding. That is very demotivating in itself.

The “easy” Linux distros can be convenient but ultimately if you want to have a good Linux experience you must be willing to learn how it works and get familiar with how things are done. You’re relearning to use a computer all over, it’s not an easy task, it takes persistence. The issues must be turned into learning experiences, not frustration and points towards “I’m done with this stupid OS”.

So I used THIS GUIDE to try to make a persistant USB stick.

Yeah you’re gonna want to use an external SSD instead. USB thumb drives can vary considerably in speed, and bottlenecking yourself there is gonna be a miserable experience.

Linux may be hating you, but that is not a reason to throw this tldr rant at us.

Sorry you had a hard time with it friend. I hated Ubuntu Cinnamon, and when I switched to EndeavourOS my experience greatly improved, but I also am a tinkerer and I enjoy using command line.

I have no idea why your experience has been so cursed, but there is definitely a lot of GUI work to do to get the Linux QOL out of the box at a suitable level for people who don’t care about tinkering and daemons and update scripts.

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In my experience, persistent usb systems are painfully slow depending on the combination of components. Is your usb drive fast enough (usb 2? 3?)? Is your usb port fast enough? Habe you tried different port on the computer? Booting from usb will most likely require the system to be loaded into memory, do you have enough for what you are trying to achieve?

That sounds awful. I’m sorry your experience on Linux was filled with troubleshooting. Sounds like hardware issues.

My favorite distros at the moment for “ease of use” is Fedora Workstation or Fedora Silverblue. They have a large user base and are well supported, making it easier to fix problems, which personally I have experienced very little.

what’s your hardware? some wifi/ethernet adapters just don’t have support in Linux :(

for persistence I’ve only ever used Ventoy, it’s a lot simpler i think and it allows you to choose the disk image to run on boot

I think the mounting /dev/sdc error is because you chose a disk, not a partition. if you run lsblk or fdisk -l it should show you the partitions you can mount. It’s usually something like /dev/sdc1