sgtlion [any]

Installing dual boot over a default windows installation would be tricky, bordering on infeasible. Because you would need to shrink the windows partition live (which is not supported (and even if you could, requires free space and comes with meaningful risk of data loss)) and alter the UEFI boot entries, which is also very risky and engineered to be protected from unauthorised writes.

Even if you got around all those limitations, Windows can constantly erase your Linux boot entries (thanks Microsoft), making a dual boot-on-one disk setup basically unusable every month which needs to be fixed. So thanks to this Windows behavior, this setup won’t work on many systems.

So you’ll pretty much only ever be able to install to another disk. And the portion of non-tech savvy users with a spare, unused disk is going to be effectively nonexistent.

Don’t get me wrong, an install-from-windows feature would be nice, but I don’t think it could feasibly overcome any meaningful barriers.

Linux definitively does dominate the end user market. You just mean the end user desktop/laptop market.

I agree though that preinstallation is the biggest deal. The fact that people have to install Linux at all is the problem. The installer itself is already 100x better than the Windows one, but that’s not enough.

Not to mention it means manufacturers ensure all the hardware is compatible, drivers etc are installed and working, which is why windows users feel it works better.