this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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46
Linux Mint a PITA to install on Win 11 (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
48 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 hours ago

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Bitlocker many meanings: in this case, it just refers to your disk encryption, and not the pro feature. Duel boot can be a pain. I wish you good luck!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Duel boot

That's probably the best way to describe it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 hours ago

Duel boot Probably a typo, but a glorious one

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 day ago

Windows is literally malware

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (2 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

For the record, installing Windows in a VM and getting it to work can be a real pain in the ass. Just a little warning: don't expect VM-Windows to be easy!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

Why is it hard? It used to be real easy to run in a VM. I am running windows 11 in docker and it was easy, maybe consider that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

True, I edited my comment. I personally recommend the USB method (or if you have easy access to the internals- just swapping out an SSD).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

You can also just install it to a VM inside Linux.

That's probably the better (but more complicated) solution.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

how did you add grub to the windows bootloader's menu? I thought microsoft made this impossible, along with adding older windows versions

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

iirc it was using Method 3 on this guide (but my efi path looks different).

Edit: oh, I also definitely used bcdedit /copy to clone the windows entry, and then edited the clone.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

The AVX512? Why would you disable that?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

Unlikely. They're not RHEL.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

BIOS setting was my issue. Something in the bios was trying to use windows boot manager as default.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I have had similar and yeah once secure boot was taken care of it was fine. Unfortunately these bios things are heavily influneced by microsoft and then machines that come with windows have settings to make it hard to not boot the windows parition that was put in. To be clear this is not a linux thing and actually should be a reason you would want to run away from windows.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

You already have two answers but let me add one more: completely smooth here. I'd been dual booting for many years and rarely have any issue (besides Windows update occasionally borking the bootloader and having to reinstall Grub)

But these days gaming on Linux is so smooth I really don't need Windows any more. I still have it on my machine, dual booting, but I haven't actually booted into Windows in at least 6 months.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I don't even game or use any Windowed only programs. I watch shows, use web apps for work, and that's about it. If I can run Firefox and Stremio that's about 95% of my needs met, ha!

I dug out my old MacBook to see if I can test out some distros on it. If I find one I like and use for a bit I'd be all in on trashing Windows

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

Great, for office-style work and Netflix there's really no reason to feel tied to Windows any more these days.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Not the one you're asking but I've been dual-booting Windows and Linux on my gaming desktop for many years, every time a build a new PC, disabling "secure boot" AND "fast boot" in the BIOS is the very first thing I do and I never had problems (I play on Linux but I keep Windows for testing in case I want to report a bug).

Fast boot is even more troublesome, since it's a Windows specific feature that allows it to not truly shutdown so it can startup faster later, but that can cause locks for other OS that won't work correctly.

In theory, Linux should be able to support secure boot (not fast boot), but since that one too was made for Windows, there are cases in which it could cause problems, I will always disable it just to be on the safe side.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Why do you need the "/s"? We are real people! It's a really bad insult to us, you know?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

You're right, I wasn't really being sarcastic. Configuring neovim (or really anything) for exceedingly long times is fun!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

I spent time yesterday writing a start command to initiate Copilot then exit in Vim, run it periodically, just to satisfy our corporate requirement of Copilot usage. It was really fun, and a nice way to give them a "fuck you".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Interesting, what distro did you end up using?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Just to add a note for OP: If your not into tinkering and taking care a of your OS don't even think to try any Arch based distro. There's a minimum time you have to spend to keep your system healthy.

Just recentlty I had a boot issue after an update (black screen on boot without login or tty) and after a lot of debugging and websearch couldn't fix my issue. At first I though of a fuckedup bootloader or to long wait time between updates but It was a recent issue with MESA and nvidia driver.

Had I looked up the EndeavourOS forum rather then my own search results that would have avoided a fuckedup fresh install wich didn't solved the issue either.

So yeah, there was a solution out there (downgrade MESA, install new nvidia driver rather than nouveau) but I wasn't looking in the right place 🫤 So here I'm with a fresh install...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Does it have persistence when rebooted ?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Yes, it's a true install, not a live cd.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I had similar issues, so I just went for Tuxedo. Works great.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I'll check it out, thx!