Look, I’m sorry if this isn’t the right place or way to post this question, I’ve never done anything like this before and navigating this forum to see if this problem has already been addressed isn’t the most intuitive process for someone like me. I’m not very tech literate. But windows is absolutely unusable anymore with all of its AI, bloatware, and cloud nonsense. So I need to switch to Linux.
I’m trying to install Fedora KDE Plasma on my laptop, and I’m following this guide:
I’m at step 3, where it says "First, insert the bootable USB drive into the computer. Subsequently, power on/restart the computer, and the boot window will automatically appear. " Except that it doesn’t automatically appear. Nothing does. Windows just boots normally. I don’t know what to do.
Additionally, everytime I plug the USB in, windows does this:
I assume this is just because the thumb drive is a linux OS so windows doesn’t like it. But, like I said, I’m not very computer literate, beyond just using them. So I don’t know if this is relevant or not.
That statement in the guide doesn’t make sense. The picture shows a BIOS setup screen. You normally need to press either Del or F2 to enter the BIOS, it doesn’t do this automatically.
Also, your system may have a menu to temporarily select a different boot device, try pressing F12 repeatedly when booting.
After you have downloaded the ISO and used MediaWriter to unpack it onto the USB drive, you need to boot from that USB drive.
To do so, you need to ensure you’ve followed “Step 3: Boot Fedora Using Bootable Media”. This may entail altering your BIOS so that it looks at the USB device before it sees the existing Windows installation and boots using it.
In step 3.1 where that guide is showing you the BIOS screen, you need to get into that screen yourself, and it gives you no indication how to do that. It’s going to be something like pressing F2 or Del or Escape when immediately after powering on - there’s normally a message saying “Press F2 to enter the BIOS” or words to that effect; you may need to tap the relevant key on the keyboard as the machine powers up - you’ll know when it’s happened! . When you do so, find the panel which lists “boot order” or words to that effect and do whatever you need to do to ensure that the USB drive is at the top of the list.
If it’s NOT at the top of the list, your machine will fire up, see the Windows hard drive first, see it’s bootable and launch straight into windows without looking for anything else (like your USB drive with the Linux installer on it). This sounds like your current situation.
Although there was no button listed on the boot page, and F2 didn’t work. So I had to do it through windows settings. But I got it done and Fedora is installing right now! Thank you!
Now if I like how it works on my laptop I’ll put it on this gaming desktop too.
Windows 11 normally uses “hibernation” so turning the system on just resumes the hibernated system and does not give you a way to boot from USB at startup. I no longer have Windows, but when I did I used a “troubleshooting” option to boot from USB. In Windows, look for “System” then “Recovery” then “Recovery options” or “Advanced Startup” for “Boot from USB”. Plug in a Live USB Installer click “Boot from USB”.
