Installation of Linux

Linux has many advantages over Mac and Window that make it potentially much easier to install:

• It is free - no need to bother user with serial numbers, etc.
• The kernel comes with all drivers, no need to ask user for ethernet & disk driver before install
• Possible to do a network installation of Linux, without any need for later updating packages
• When replacing hardware, it is usually not necessary to reinstall Linux, this is certainly not the case on Windows. And on Mac you do not even have the freedom to change hardware.

However there are lot of small annoyances while installing Linux (here Fedora 18)

• Even when having more than 8 GB of memory, it will not copy the base-system from USB/CD to memory before launching. The CD will keep spinning up/down every time you access anything not in cache during installation. When using a livecd as rescue method, this is particular annoying as everything gets really slow to work with.
• Installation cd's are never updated after initial release, even through they have many bugs. Since very few users test the livecd before final release, a lot of bugs are found after release. These gets fixed in updates, but it never gets to the installation media. As a consequences you might be unable to install Fedora on a new system, even though the system could work after an update.
• Letting Linux handle the partitioning usually means creating lot of unnecessary paritions, ie /boot, /etc, /usr. Since most systems (if not all) can handle all these on one partition, why not just use / and /home?