"My sister has had an expensive gaming machine and didn't use it and doesn't use it now but might do some light gaming stuff at an indeterminate point in the future and is currently using my personal laptop to do basic web browsing, I'm trying to ensure that my sister can keep doing web browsing but whenever I ask my friends for advice they start at a high price point and the people I know who have purchased used equipment have bad experiences with it that I'm not interested in duplicating; is it possible to get an inexpensive computer that will accomplish what I'm looking for here without it turning into a time suck because I'm not particularly good at computers?" is not what someone says when they want you to start speccing out a machine that requires a graphics card that costs as much as the machine that they actually need. The question was not "can you find me a less expensive gaming machine?" it was "is there such a thing as an affordable non-garbage machine my sister can use to look at Ao3 or are my choices 'used office machine old enough to have a driver's license,' 'cheap-but-trash machine that will have to be replaced annually,' or 'gaming rig that costs as much as a car'?"

I get where you're coming from here, almost everybody CAN become technical if they want to, but most people who are not CURRENTLY technical can't generally become technical in the timeframe that they would need to in order to manage whatever problem they're having.

So I search for information about how to do checksum bullshit in Windows and the instructions I come to from the Ubuntu site say "If you aren't using linux on windows, why on earth not? You should do this by installing linux."

THAT IS THE THING THAT I AM TRYING TO DO I NEED AN INSTRUCTION FOR HOW TO DO A STEP IN THE OS THAT I AM CURRENTLY USING SO THAT I CAN INSTALL LINUX.

Seriously, follow some links with me. From the link above to this:

From that to releases:

From the release download you can get info on how to burn the images to disk:

Which tells you that you need to verify the image:

and then links you for info on how to do that in Linux!!!!!

THIS CHASES NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE AWAY. THIS IS WHY NON-TECHNICAL PEOPLE THINK LINUX IS SCARY. BECAUSE WE GO 'OH NO YOU HAVE TO VERIFY YOUR DOWNLOAD IT'S A VITAL SECURITY STEP' and then the non-technical people go "Okay how do I do that" and the instructions say "Why aren't you already using linux, dipshit?"

Because that is, legitimately, where a lot of people get lost.

*I* knew how to find other documentation without relying on ONLY links from the foundation I got the install from, non-technical people *don't* know how to do that and a lack of clear instructions paired with a tremendously unwelcoming user base makes beginners stumble.

Ubuntu is not the only tech documentation I'm familiar with (and is certainly not the only linux documentation that is confusing, circular, and poorly formatted), and there are a ton of tech literate people who recommend various ubuntu distros for a number of reasons.

My job is talking to non-technical people about their tech stacks so that the decision-makers don't have to be exposed to techs and the whole reason that my job is necessary is because "git gud" is an unfortunately common communication strategy in tech spaces.

My hobby is infosec and this attitude of "you're stupid for using this program and stupider for missing the obvious instruction to open a terminal window and install via command line" is genuinely a massive security problem because it convinces normies that any attempt to "do tech stuff" is futile so they don't bother.

We are trying to verify the integrity of an ISO file

We do that by verifying the checksum for the ISO file

OP's Screenshots, in order, show:

The frustrating and condescending message the she received when she tried to look up further instructions for this step in the Ubuntu documentation pages. This links you to:

What seems to be the beginning of the Ubuntu install guide??? From which you can choose your specific use case, i.e. WSL, which then links you to:

The place where it tells you to run the command in question - which seems to be a page where it is telling you to install Ubuntu, NOT a page telling you how to verify the checksums on individual software packets you might have downloaded in order to do so? Which... if you're non-tech-y, and you're worried about possibly bricking your one and only computer because you ran an unverified program that might be a virus or broken somehow (damaged/missing packets - not that you, a non-tech-savvy person, would know that) you are probably ready to give up by this point? Also, if you have the individual install files and not the singular Ubuntu file referenced in that command line, that command would fail anyway, would it not???

A screenshot that indicates a list of places to download the ISO files in question [cut off, but presumably listed below] and links you to a how-to for burning the images to a disk

A screenshot that tells you that you need to verify the ISO integrity, and then apparently (per OP) links you to how to do that in Ubuntu... the thing that you don't have installed...

Like. Okay. Is there a world in which downloading that specific file packet (Ubuntu 24.04) and running that specific command (wsl --install Ubuntu-24.04) bypasses the need for all of this, because it simply installs Ubuntu, this verifying checksums as part of the process? I mean, sure, maybe. But at no point in any of those screenshots does it say anything like "running 'wsl --install -Unbuntu 24.04' will verify checksums as part of the process"; so to me, it in fact does NOT say that in the screenshots. At best that's something that you read into the instructions with outside knowledge that you have, that the non-tech set that this stream was directed at do not have. That's absolutely going to scare them off!

And also, what else does that do? Does it, for instance, uninstall or otherwise render unusable the Windows OS that OP seems to be trying to leave intact, for non-techy users who are just trying to get their feet wet with Linux? Because if so, that's a perfect deliberation of why non-tech people hate tech people, and also why OP has the job that she does.

Also, there's two methods for installing Ubuntu shown in that screenshot. It's late, and I'm sick again, and very tired, but in my experience, often - not always, but often - when there's two methods to do something, there's a possibility that one of the methods accomplishes something different than the other method; you can't simply mix and match unless you understand both pretty in depth. If you are a non-tech person trying to follow these directions, you are barely following the tech jargon in these screenshots. The last thing you want to do is guess and be wrong and fuck up your entire computer. You are not going to knowingly follow instructions from Method A when you are supposed to be following Method B unless you are an idiot, because then when you take your computer to Geek nephew or Geek Squad, they're going to look at you and be like "well why didn't you just follow the instructions?" And I know this, because I've had to rewrite tech instructions on the fly for people in my real life at my real job because the engineers just assumed that Everybody Knew Stuff that Everybody Did Not Know.

I do consider myself a tech person and let me tell you something: You are 100% percent CORRECT.

The problem with a lot of this is a lack of communication. Like, you want Linux to be used by the everyday person? Don't tell them RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual)! You need to WTFM (WRITE THE FUCKING MANUAL) so people can actually read it.

This is the reason global warming got the bullshit rep that it did: The people explaining it did not know how to actually communicate it. It took DECADES to even get what little traction we have and it's still "Golly! Look at all this snow! Sure don't look like GlObAl WaRmInG to me!"

I can see where the screenshot says to run wsl --install, but what it does not say, which I can tell you the nontechnical person is going to have as the first question when they see that is:

"WHERE do I run wsl --install...?"

They aren't going to intuit that you need to open command prompt and run as admin then type 'wsl --install...'. (The .exe file is much more likely to be how a non-technical person would try to install it except that nontechnical people have been warned a million times not to click on .exe files if they don't know exactly what they do)

The thing is, if you've never cooked *anything* before, none of that stuff is intuitive and it's hard to find instructions for that sort of thing because it's assumed to be *such* baseline knowledge that it can go unsaid. It's the exact type of assumption that makes tech people skip over the "open up command prompt to run wsl --install..." instruction when they're writing these kinds of install guides.

I get that not every type of instruction set can include this level of granular detail (and there are some distros that get closer to this level of detail - it's why I tend to rec Mint to newbies if I'm not installing it for them myself) but there are going to be people who are learning how to do these things that ARE going to need this level of detail.

Anyway. It's why my site is written the way that it is both for tech guides and recipes.

mom's minion memes for real justice