Linux @lemmy.ml JustOneMoreCat @lemmy.blahaj.zone 3d ago

Linux Mint a PITA to install on Win 11

I have a Windows 11 laptop and recently gotten excited to try Linux. I read good things about Mint being pretty good to go out of the box, and while I can be a fast learner I'm also tired and don't have a tremendous amount of bandwidth.

So I followed all the installation instructions, verified, flashed a USB, booted into it and started to install a dual boot of it. Made it through installation until it told me my computer had BitLocker on, and I'd need to go turn it off and try again. Fair enough.

Went back into my Windows OS (after booting it went to "diagnosing your PC"). I don't seem to have bitlocker installed - looks like a Pro version thing which I don't have. It did show that encryption was enabled, so I turned it off.

Restarted to boot to USB. Nope, "mmx64.efi - Not Found" error.

OK, googled it, renamed it, let's go.

error: shim_lock protocol not found error: you need to load kernel first

OK... I googled it just enough to see this is going to be a pain.

I tried remaking my USB just in case, didn't help. It's extra frustrating because my first attempt to boot into Linux went so well! How did it go from booting into it flawlessly to giving me a series of errors?

Did I anger the Microsoft gods and now they're blocking my path? Is this a bad omen that Linux is going to be a problem on my laptop in general?

46 comments

Exactly what happened.

Microsoft is deliberately making it crazy hard to use linux. We're so used to dealing with hostile relationships recently that we dont even recognize this broken situation.

Anyway, can you try installing it on separate ssd? Its rather hard to run it in dual boot because windows will frequently fuck up your bootloader and so on.

Btw bitlocker is the encryption.
- Windows is literally malware
- I had a bad feeling that dual booting wouldn't be the seamless thing I hoped for. I have an old Mac laptop I might try installing on to see how I like it and decide if I'm just gonna wipe Windows entirely.
  
  It's incredible how shit Windows is and everyone just accepts it. It shows me ads on my lock screen FFS (and I know how to disable that cuz I've done it three times now and they keep coming back like a horror movie monster you didn't behead).
  
  You're hitting the nail on the head. That and all the benefits that linux holds are the reason why i wipe windows from every computer i can get my hands on.
  
  Unfortunately, the windows bootloader issues are also ingrained in UEFI for many motherboards. Every few days I start my PC up and it has decided my grub entry is garbage and does me the favor of removing it and defaulting back to the windows bootloader.
  
  I've worked around this by adding a bootcfg entry to the windows bootloader that points at grub. Now any time this happens, I pick the grub entry from the windows bootloader, my PC reboots, and now it'll keep defaulting to grub again until the next time it decides to wipe it.
  
  It takes some doing, but you can live boot windows from a USB drive for those rare instances you need it. You can also just install it to a VM inside Linux (also not easy). But honestly these days the times where you'll NEED Windows are few and far between (and getting fewer and farther).
This is a bit of a hack, but while you wait for a new drive or laptop, you could install Linux onto a thumb drive and run it from there.

When you use Rufus to write the image to the flash drive, it should give you the option to create a persistent storage section with a slider to say how much of the drive to allocate to that. At least this should keep Microsoft from destroying the data on it, lthough it will probably ask every time it starts up whether you want to format that drive.

This way you can just use whatever your BIOS boot key is, probably something like F12, to boot onto your Linux and keep it away from Microsoft :)
seems like a secure boot issue, make sure in your bios settings:

Windows fast boot is disabled

Secure boot is disabled

AVX512 is disabled (if you have an option for it in cpu settings)
- The AVX512? Why would you disable that?
  
  I had a problem once booting into linux with it enabled, this was quite a while ago and it works fine now but mint could be running on a kernel old enough to have problems with it?
Bitlocker many meanings: in this case, it just refers to your disk encryption, and not the pro feature. ~~Duel~~ Dual boot can be a pain. I wish you good luck!
- Duel boot Probably a typo, but a glorious one
I did it in that way: I installed a second hard drive in my laptop and installed Mint in there. Happy dual boot. But I must say that I knowingly did buy a laptop with an option for a second drive.
shim_lock protocol not found appears to be a result of secure boot failing. One simple solution would be to go to the BIOS and disable SecureBoot. You can also try to configure it to recognize your efi but I'd turn it off first and see if that helps.
- BIOS setting was my issue. Something in the bios was trying to use windows boot manager as default.
  
  Once you fixed that issue did Linux work well dual booting? I'm sure I can get past it but I'm mostly worried that this foreshadows ongoing problems
Personally I just installed Mint instead of Windows. If you back up your important files to an external drive, then what's the harm? Even if you need to go back to Windows, that's just another USB flash drive setup.
- Alternatively, if you have the money, you can just buy a new drive and hold on to your old one. For a while I actually installed linux onto a flash drive and used that. (Not a live boot to be clear)
- That's great if you're in the mindset of "just wipe and reload it's not a problem" But most people who aren't chronic computer users aren't like that. Spending 2+ hours resetting up their computer to be just like it was isn't fun to most people.
  
  Whaaaaaaaat!?! Nonsense! Sacrilege! I love spending 8 hours at a time reconfiguring neovim from scratch to get full LSP support and 20 millisecond start-up times! Who wouldn't love doing that!?!!!??!!?! (/hj)
  
  Edit: half-joking (/hj), not sarcastic (/s).
  
  This. I had to do my attempted Linux install while my kid was napping in like my 30 mins of free time I get a day if I'm lucky
Get a 2nd drive to install it on. Dual booting will only cause you trouble and headaches. For example, if you manage to fix it, next update it will break again.
Probably a secure boot issue Microsoft likes to cause issues for OS on the same HDD/SSD. Maybe try mint in a VM in windows and if you like it. Let her rip.
I had a very similar issue when starting my Linux journey, also on a laptop running windows 11. I could not actually fix the issue until I tried installing a different distro entirely.

Check it Ventoy, it's become a handy tool for me. Lets you have several bootable ISOs or images on a single USB.
- Interesting, what distro did you end up using?
  
  I've tried quite a few but right now the longest surviving one is Manjaro. This system still dual boots (technically a actually triple boot lol), so you can fix the issue.
  
  I also have Fedora on another pc and I don't care for it. I also have dabbled very lightly with Debian (hosting some services), Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Endeavour, Cachy, Mint, KDE Neon, and PopOS.
  
  I have liked the Arch based distros the most so far, and highly prefer KDE Plasma as a desktop environment.
You can install Mint on a usb drive, or external ssd. I personally run it on two of my machines where the internal drive died, on a usb stick. These wear out, but hey, for now, it works. So get a second usb, and install it there, or nuke Windows to get it to run well.
- Does it have persistence when rebooted ?
  
  Yes, it's a true install, not a live cd.
I had similar issues, so I just went for Tuxedo. Works great.
- I'll check it out, thx!

46 comments