So in 2013 I had a Windows XP computer that hard drive had died. By 2013 XP was a rather old OS. It worked perfectly fine, other than I probably could have done well to do a reinstall.
Problem is, in 2013 I was making $115 per week. I couldn't afford to spend 2 months pay on a new PC. I had a spare hard drive I could replace it with, but the problem was, if I bought a new WinXP installation disc, it would cost $250 for an OS that was hard to find because of how long it hadn't been supported. It would be like trying to find a Win Vista CD today.....if they were still trying to charge full price.
So I thought "Ok, what if I try this Linux thing?"
So I did what everyone here is going to groan at me for saying. I tried the one everyone online was saying was the best one. Ubuntu.
I HATED it. The other thing besides my IMMEDIATE hatred for it, was the fact that it didn't work. I couldn't get the internet, or sound, or bluetooth, or a lot of things working.
And when I was going to the library, asking questions online, and then printing the answers a week later, everyone was saying "Oh, try these other disros...."
It is ASTOUNDING to me how linux users think. The answer to every problem someone else is facing is "Your way is stupid, that's why it doesn't work. Do it MY way, on MY distros"
Everybodys answer was that I was doing it wrong for using Ubuntu instead of (insert their flavor of the month here).
I must have downloaded 50 different distros and tried installing all of them one after another in a 3 month timespan. Hardly any of them worked. I think I got 2 of them to install besides Ubuntu.
Mint was one, I think the other was Cinnimon.
Some wouldn't install at all. Some would crash frequently. Almost all of them had a solid green tint to the screen. Like it was missing video drivers. Eventuallly I just gave up.
After a few years, I eventually got a new Windows 7 PC in 2014.
And it's been running fine ever since. But now we're at a point where if you buy a new product, there's a chance it won't work with Windows 7. The problem is, I REFUSE to go to Windows 10 or 11 with how much privacy invasive those platforms have become.
So I was trying to see if Zorin could install this one program. 8BitDo Ultimate Software V2. But I don't have much hard drive space to install Zorin. So I heard you can install it on a liveUSB. Since I just need to use the program once really, it didn't matter if it's going to be a temporary installlation.
Well, Zorin wanted me to install Windows Software App. So I thought I did. It asked me if I wanted to installl. I said yes. The spinny circle went around for a while, and then it told me I could either uninstall or open the app's homepage.
After a few more attempts at fiddling with it, nothing happened. I came to the conclusion (maybe incorrectly, as it's just my own assumptions), that maybe it's not working because it's not a permanent install.
So I used THIS GUIDE to try to make a persistant USB stick.
Everything went fine until the actual install at 5:59 of the video. At 6:00 he jump cuts to after the installation. The installation itself took roughly 5 hours.
And then it took roughly 30 minutes to boot. I googled it, and it should only take 15-20 minutes to install, and boot almost instantly.
Couple this, with an unrelated issue where I haven't been able to turn on my fan on my raspberry pi for 4 years, and I think linux just hates me.
Three different sets of hardware. Video guides where I do exactly as they show. Nothing helps. Linux has always just NOT worked for me. Like it puts down a seemingly easy problem to fix, but then won't actually do the thing you're telling it to do to fix it.
Like in the guide he's showing at 6:12. I've done every exactly the same thing he did, in the exact same way he did them, but he gets his second partition mounted as "target". I don't.
I tried sudo mount /dev/sdc/ but terminal spit out an error.
But I watched to the end of the video, and he says that part was only if you have errors booting the device. I did not have errors booting the device, so I skipped it, because it had been at that point close to 6 hours since I started the project, for something that was supposed to take an hour, and I just wanted to go to bed.
So the persistant drive boot sequence starts, and just starting the boot took 30 minutes.
And now, everything is just sluggishly slow. It's like I'm trying to run Windows XP on a computer that would struggle with Windows 3.1
The hardware shouldn't be an issue. Especially since supposedly Zorin 17 only needs 1.5ghz, duel core, and I have 4 core 3.75ghz. Every spec they listed as needed for Zorin I easily have double.
So I figure there must be some OTHER problem. And that's where I am now. I've spent a combined total of about 12 hours trying to find some way to run 1 program for about 5 minutes. All I need to do is run it once. Then I'll be done with it. I just need to find something that will actually run it.
So, this isn't a very fun advice, but a big part of a Linux distro is changing your starting configuration and dependencies and everything. So it is true that changing your distro can make a whole bunch of things work out of the box that didn't before, especially if it's a weird distro. Now, can you make it work on any distro? Also yes, but it's more effort, and if you're printing help at a library, yeah it might be a better choice to just try a bunch of distros and at least try to find the one that gets you on the Internet out of the box. Bazzite for example literally ships with Steam, Wine, and a whole bunch of gaming utilities out of the box, so for a gamer that means more stuff works out of the box, and that's great if you hate tinkering.
There's a lot of complicated legal and philosophical stuff in the Linux world where some drivers are either not shipped by default because it's proprietary and it makes puritans angry, or legally, the firmware just cannot be distributed by the distro.
And sometimes, you really just don't vibe with the distro. Ubuntu has a way of doing things, so if you hated Ubuntu (2013 would put you in the Unity era which was pretty terrible, it was wildly hated for that reason). Fedora has a different way of doing things. Mint takes a bunch of stuff people hate with Ubuntu and fixes it. Pop_OS takes stuff they hate from Ubuntu and fix it. If you hated Ubuntu, why bother trying to fix it?
And when picking niche distros like Zorin you also significantly reduce you help pool, because it's not that popular so people don't know how it works. You ask me something about Void Linux and I'm gonna be like, I don't know man, I have no idea how to solve you problem on that distro. But I do know how on Arch and Debian based distros. Niche distros are sharp double-edged sword: it can be very nice because it lines up exactly with what you want, or you could be fighting endlessly with the distro because you're trying to do the polar opposite of what it wants you to do.
You can go beyond that obviously, Linux is endlessly customizable, but that takes experience and skill with Linux to do successfully because it might involve compiling stuff from source and whatnot. It's not hard, but it does come with a lot of pitfalls on its own.
What's the performance of your USB stick? You can check with utilities like CrystalDiskMark on Windows, so you get the Windows numbers. My guess is your USB stick is a USB 2.0 stick and is horribly slow at anything other than bulk file reading and writing. That could explain why it was so bad and that'd make it not Linux's fault. The live USB would decompress into RAM, so it's faster because it's compressed (less data to read), and the data is then in RAM where it's very very fast to access.
I actually had the same issue but in reverse: I needed to run motherboard software just once on Windows to configure a few features once forever. I installed it on the only USB stick I had, a 32GB Verbatim from Microcenter. It took hours to install, a solid half an hour to make it to the Windows desktop, and probably like an hour to manage to open up Edge, download the software, install it and run it. It was absolutely horrible.
That's not a valid command because
/dev/sdc/isn't a folder, it's a device file. It probably would have worked withsudo mount /dev/sdc, without the trailing/. But that still would only work if the drive is listed in/etc/fstabas to where it should be mounted. You ideally wantsudo mount /dev/sdc /some/other/pathso it ends up mounted where you want it. Or just mount it from the file manager which will do it for you in a temporary location.I don't really have better advice for you and Linux. For some people it just works out of the box, some other people have more annoying hardware that's a pain to get working. With the attitude you have, you don't seem like you want to take the time to learn how Linux works and get used to it, so you end up frustrated and you just go nowhere. Sometimes it really just takes persistence to get through it.
You're not helping yourself at all doing weird setups like temporarily installing it on a USB stick. As I said in my other comment, you started off with an impossible task (that app will not work in Wine), so you're also thrown into a rabbit hole of commands and troubleshooting that has no chance of succeeding. That is very demotivating in itself.
The "easy" Linux distros can be convenient but ultimately if you want to have a good Linux experience you must be willing to learn how it works and get familiar with how things are done. You're relearning to use a computer all over, it's not an easy task, it takes persistence. The issues must be turned into learning experiences, not frustration and points towards "I'm done with this stupid OS".