I’m pretty happy with the linux installation process these days. Unless you’re a distro-hopper it isn’t something that you have to deal with on a regular basis. Even before developers put in a lot of hours to make the process easier, it was something that I only had to get right once per device.
Spoiler: No it’s not
Installing an OS is hard. That’s why most people don’t do that
Depends on the distro you choose to install and your knowledge of computers.
As a former computer illiterate, I certainly was stressed throughout the process of making a bootable USB drive and installing Linux Mint for the first time. Selecting whether to include multi-media codecs or not also tripped me up a bit, as I didn’t know what that meant at the time. There are good points raised here, and some deserved praise for the streamlined installers.
As pointed out, it seems easy and straightforward after one has done it a few times. Now, the only thing that gives me grief is configuring GRUB to recognize GhostBSD, and that’s mostly because I have yet to RTFM.
To the point of “Our installers are just better”, I would put a “depend of what installer you are talking about and your desired setup”.
I was going to try Manjaro and install it on my gaming PC (which was using NixOS previously). The problem is that on Calamares, I was not able to find a way to mount my other encrypted drives besides root. This was disappointing, because I know I could do that on the Fedora installation (which uses Anaconda), for example.
But coming back to the topic, the fear of installing a distro comes to the fact of not knowing what you are doing and screwing up your data. This is why you need to be focused on what you are doing at that moment. And also, some guided help would be great (I used to do that with friends at the Uni).
I can bang out a Linux install in ten minutes on a VM, with the mainstream workstation/server distros. In fact, that’s what I do if I need a throwaway Linux instance for testing anything, I’ve never really seen the need for premade VM images, at least in my use case, direct installation from a local ISO works fine.
Windows installation is and has always been supremely annoying to do in comparison, especially now that Cortana talks at you during setup.
I’ve installed more than 15 different OSes more than 100 times. The OS which I typically recommend, Trisquel KDE, is incredibly easy to install. It’s somewhat difficult to use however. If you want something extremely simple even for use, go for Kubuntu.