Why so difficult?

Look how easy it is to install Windows: you put in a disk, it pretty much installs itself.  Why can't Linux do this?  I am sick to death of MS installing stuff on MY computer--whether I like it or not, and no doubt there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of others who feel the same way.  I have struggled just to make a bootable disk to install Mint... why isn't there a link to such an image?? Burn it to a disk, it works like a Windows install disk???  Finally I managed to get a USB stick to boot and install but somewhere along the installation came a glitch and looking online found other people have had the same issue.  I saw somewhere a setup that ran indistinguishably (at a glance) from Windows and this is what I want to do.  Why does it have to be so difficult?