NGL I gotta say that sounds like a fluke. I’ve never had to spend more than an hour on a fresh windows install. I run Windows on my desktop and Linux Mint on my laptop. So while I haven’t done thousands of installs if 7 hours was a constant issue no one would be using Windows.
It’s 7 hours when you factor in the updates and the time spent having to go fish for software all over the Internet.
What kind og software did you need to find? Last time i did a fresh install of win10 (a couple of weeks ago), I downloaded Rufus to make the bootable USB and that was the only thing I needed to go “fish for all over the internet”… 30min later I was up and running, updates scheduled to run during the night when I didn’t need to use the computer.
Fish for software… honestly it’s harder to find your shit working for Linux than windows. But to each their own department.
