I was talking to my dad yesterday and he talked about how he dual booted windows and Linux in his college days. I immediately left to download Ubuntu, I feel so dumb for forgetting it’s an option. I literally only use windows so I can play Fortnite with friends. PSA: you can have both Linux and Windows, or you can use a vm in Linux. Be (mostly) free from Microsoft’s clammy hands.
imo dual booting is kinda clunky. Id rather have a vm of windows tbh. I dont like restarting my pc to swtich OS.
But hey if you like it, more power to you man.
Only did it bc anti cheats. I would use vms otherwise.
Ah I gotcha. Another option im considering is using a separate pc for windows and using a kvm to switch between them. That may be a good option for you as well if you can swing it.
Buy a $30 SSD and put Windows on it. Boot to SSD when you want to use Windows, and put it down the booting order list in BIOS, so Linux always gets booted by default.
You will hear less about dual booting in Linux community because Windows loves to destroy GRUB bootloader, and also Windows is just becoming more and more annoying so there is a “nudging” or push to adopt Linux, forcibly or otherwise.
wait, you can have two different systems, on two SSDs, on the same computer? this will be useful once i get to build my pc. Thanks!
i’m guessing having windows on a separate drive will mean that it won’t break GRUB?
Many ThinkPad models have a separate extra M.2 WWAN slot for 4G SIM modem, something you can check with respective models’ PSREF sheet. You can put either 128 or 256 GB (whatever specified) M.2 SSD of sizes either 2230 or 2242, which I was able to do on my L470 (a very modern laptop).
On a desktop, it is obviously easy, but on laptops, it depends, but you will find ThinkPads to be the most pro-consumer and pro-poweruser laptops.
As others have said, I also highly recommend physically separate drives. I have found both Linux and Windows affect each other sometimes especially when you’re getting your bearings with dual booting.
For instance, after running Linux the clock in Windows will be wrong. And Windows will eat the Linux boot partition especially after feature packs (formerly called service packs), which come out about 1-2/year.
Just install linux 2nd and have it probe foreign OS, and create a linux only boot partition. Grub will then make a chainloader entry to windows boot partition. Linux won’t care if you select windows chainload option, and Windows won’t know it ia being chainloaded. No OS overlap. just set Grub Boot entry as primary boot in BIOS, EFI.
I always found having each OS have a separate physical drive is much better, but partitioning is fine if you must.
Third world countries: We must 😔…
It’s a luxury indeed. Hopefully maybe a little less now that decent storage has come down in price a lot
Not a luxury. A 128 GB SSD can be bought for about $25 (last year) or even cheaper now, and you buy once for many years, as home users write a lot less on SSDs.
Use Grub2Win (https://sourceforge.net/projects/grub2win/) whenever Windows manages to break dual booting. It’ll stop fucking up afterwards, as it’ll be installed within one of the windows boot partitions.
