[Rant] I swear to fucking god. Windows is harder to use than Linux. Have any of you ever USED Windows lately? Holy fuck.
I'm helping a family member build a pc. He wanted to use Windows because "Linux can't play games" despite me having a perfectly good gaming laptop running Linux that runs all my games, even graphically intensive ones.
2 days later, no game has been played yet. We can't even get steam to start. I even installed Arch on a sata ssd I donated just to verify the pc parts actually work (took less than an hour). It took 1 and a half days to even get the Windows 11 installer to get past like the 3rd screen.
Fucking fuck. Dealing with all this fucking bullshit is far worse than not being able to play a few trashy anticheat pay 2 win games. The anti Linux circlejerk is real.
It's not Windows, it's either a firmware or hardware issue. Windows installs very quickly actually, nowadays, but of course it's full of ad tracking etc.
Remove the graphics card and any other extras. Just start with the motherboard, power supply, RAM and hard drive. Try install it. It should work. If not, it may be a motherboard issue. You may have to boot into the bios and see if the firmware can be updated, check secure boot, UEFI etc.
Reset the bios to factory and try again.
Once windows is installed. Install the graphics card driver, then shut it down, install the card, move the HDMI over to the card and boot. It should work.
Doesn't mean it's not a hardware issue, just means they aren't running into it in their Arch install. But honestly this is probably just a bunch of bull.