I feel like this may backfire, because people may accidentally replace their OS, get really pissed off, and start talking about how installing Linux is really dangerous and might wipe all your data, etc.

I find that live USB drives, like the Linux Mint installer are a fantastic way to show potential converts around. If they like it, all they had to do is click install.

Anyone that cannot figure out how to install linux probably shouldn't be fucking with their operating system in the first place.

You can also just buy a live USB distro and install by doing nothing more than turning off your computer and turning it on again, which is even easier than installing a program in windows.

Furthermore, there is a very real argument to be made that you should NOT be able to EASILY nuke an operating system from within itself. Windows devs would be pretty reasonable to define any program able to easily do that as being malware.

Back in the days of CD Drives you just inserted the linux disk from a magazine or from a bestbuy that sold OpenSUSE and did a restart and it booted from CD ready to install, just like you'd install a game.

USB stick is just as simple but people don't know the process to make the stick or boot and hit the f key that gives them temp boot device options so it is a "harder" process

Rest assured, microslop will find a way to break it.

This used to exist. Anyone remember WUBI? https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wubi

I have a hard time imagining a less rewarding user-facing software to be maintainer of. That’s probably why there isn’t one.

Thousands of hours and being blamed for dozens of people softbricking their PCs (which they now probably lack the USB route to recover from) - all because writing an ISO to USB and rebooting is too much friction?

That would a security risk. It would allow the micrsoft kernel to change what is written to disk.

This is how we did it before MS enshittified the boot loaders.

I may be misunderstanding your post but is WSL not what you're looking for? It's quite simple to install and setup. It's Linux inside Windows.

there is and i also think there should be.

but i would never use one or recommend doing so.

There does exist a tool that does it. The creator posted about it on the fediverse. It only supported ubuntu at the time but looked extremely promising.

I cannot remember it's name. :/

Maybe it's linixify? But I remember seeing a post on lemmy with a youtube demo?

There's nothing easier than booting from a thumb drive and clicking "install", IMO. Having to load Windows first is just adding an extra step.

There’s not a lot of ways to directly do what you are talking about. Closest it can come up with would be a small program that shrinks the windows partition, creates new partitions for the linux install, reboots into the new linux system, kicks off a migration tool that deletes all the data you don’t want to bring over, shrink the windows partition again, migrate data over in chunks to the home folder partition, resize and move more chunks, eventually deleting windows entirely and leaving a fragmented mess of a Linux install with a lot of chances for shit to go wrong.

It’s safer and cleaner to back up, wipe, start over.

I don't think it matters so much. It's possible to test Linux literally in seconds with nothing to install thanks to virtual machines on the Web. It's risk free.

What prevents people from migrating isn't technical, it's mostly FUD and marketing (not to say lies) from MicroSlop.

Asahi linux does this, you run a script and it installs. No USB needed. That’s on apple silicon hardware though.

we had it back in the day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZipSlack

You mean something like Operese ?

I heard that one is pretty recent.

This might not be feasible. IDK how you could install a whole OS, inside of another, without looking like a serious virus or malware. There are many files that cannot be changed while Windows is running (why it needs to reboot so often for updates). And no sane OS is going to let a program edit things like the MBR.

Your options to try out Linux without disrupting your Windows experience are:

• WSL, which is using a Linux kernel that is running in a VM (WSL 2). This will let you run some Linux applications on Windows.

• Live Disk, This gives you a full Linux environment but may lack persistence (your settings are loss on reboot) and performance issues (using a USB drive as a system drive is slow).

• Linux on a VM, This gives you a full Linux environment with persistence and good performance but you won't have access to your hardware, like your graphics card, to do things like gaming (You maybe able to use passthrough, I haven't used Windows VM software in quite a while).

• Dual Boot, The full Linux experience. Requires another hard drive or a willingness to resize your partitions (which could* destroy your Windows install).

The installation step is trivialized on some distros, just a simple series of dialog boxes. Like installing Windows was in the 00's before you had to watch streaming ads and give it access to your medical records while creating your OneMicrosoft Online Co-365-Pilot Teams Drive Pro account.

*I have literally never had a single problem resizing partitions in 20 years of doing this, but it is technically possible if you lose power or are really unlucky with the cosmic ray lottery.

e: To your question directly: As long as you're not trying to mess with Window's system partition you should technically be able to resize/create partitions, create a new file system, copy files, and add a boot entry from inside of Windows. Ubuntu was the last big project to have a sustained effort to attract new users, WUBI was a big part of that project. Now, there just isn't as much interest.

I have seen distros that offer methods for installing Linux directly from Windows but I wouldn't use them. Live CDs are a good way to test if that distro, or even Linux in general, will work properly on that computer. For example, if you installed Linux on a computer with a WiFi adapter that Linux doesn't currently support, you wouldn't have known this if you just installed Linux directly from Windows without testing it first and there is no simple solution to this problem.

Now, if you could install Linux onto an external hard drive from Windows, then this might be fine because you'd have a dual boot between the two OSs and can easily fallback to Windows if Linux doesn't work properly. However, as far as I'm aware, you'd still need to boot into the bios and change the boot loader so that Linux can actually boot.

I mean, Microsoft could supply an option to safely install Linux as a dual boot, alongside Windows, done by Windows, itself.

That is the only way I would trust such a tool, and even then, I might not.

There's so much closed source code involved in doing it that way - it feels like only Microsoft staff could have any hope to verify compatibility of all the necessary components.

Booting to a Live USB Linux first provides a clean-room - a known, publicly verified open source platform - to perform the installation from.

Such a clean room can be avhieved within Windows, but only by Microsoft engineers with full access to the entirety of Microsoft's source code.

My question is: why do you want the "smoothest brains" on linux? That won't happen until OEMs are selling hardware with linux preinstalled, which they do on chromeos and android btw.

IMO blind adoption for the sake of it brings no benefit