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.

  • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
    49·
    11 months ago

    I always found having each OS have a separate physical drive is much better, but partitioning is fine if you must.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      9·
      11 months ago

      Partitioning is great with a boot partition for each OS,and linux chainloading to windows. Then I have aseparate NTFS drive as secondary drive in Windows and Linux, in case I need to work on data in either OS

      • EddoWagt@feddit.nl
        1·
        11 months ago

        Partitioning is great with a boot partition for each OS

        Until Windows eats your Linux boot partition. I’ve learned my lesson, I only dual boot with separate drives now

        • jbk@discuss.tchncs.de
          2·
          11 months ago

          And when’s the last time that happened to you? I have Windows and Linux on my UEFI laptop on the same disk since 2020 and never had that happen on Windows 10 and 11.

          • EddoWagt@feddit.nl
            1·
            11 months ago

            A couple of years ago, don’t know exactly, but maybe 2018? Somewhere around there at least

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
          2·
          11 months ago

          Windows wont if you set two independent boot partitions, and you chainload from kinux grub to windows. windows never realizes there is another boot partition. Grub is your BIOS EFI default and Grub has an entry to kickoff windows boot. You can even boot to linux right after what ahould be a windows update restart, do your linux work and when you kickoff windows again the reatart and update continues. i have had this setup since 2017.

  • YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca
    25·
    11 months ago

    I installed a second SSD into my new laptop and installed Debian on it. I set the new drive as the primary boot drive so windows doesn’t get a say and only loads when I select it from the boot menu. This way windows can’t trash the boot loader when it updates.

  • monsterpiece42@reddthat.com
    22·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
      5·
      11 months ago

      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.

    • PainInTheAES@lemmy.world
      5·
      11 months ago

      Anecdotally I’ve been dual booting Windows 11/Linux on my laptop for a couple years and I’ve never had issues with Windows affecting the boot partition and I feel like this is much less common with EFI. You can even have a separate EFI partition for Linux and choose boot order from the BIOS.

      I’ve always done partition based dual booting since I first started using Linux and the last time I remember having an issue with Windows fucking with boot setup was like early/mid 2010s and it’s only happened a couple times in like 10 years of on and off dual booting.

    • callyral [he/they]@pawb.socialEnglish
      6·
      11 months ago

      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?

      • LeFantome@programming.dev
        5·
        11 months ago

        I think they may actually be suggesting that you let each OS be the primary OS and then just control which one you want via boot order in the BIOS.

        But yes, if Windows is able to install its boot loader on its own drive, it will not mess up the Linux boot loader on another drive. The Linux boot loader can detect Windows though and allow you to boot to it ( and Linux too of course ). That is why you make sure Linux boots first.

      • Froyn@kbin.social
        5·
        11 months ago

        Muahaha, long ago had a system with a removable 5.25" HDD bay. Matching drives in enclosures, 1 linux, 1 windows. One “permanent” drive in the machine for user data.
        Super easy to swap between the OS when you’re physically changing the first drive on the IDE chain.

      • mateomaui@reddthat.comEnglish
        31·
        11 months ago

        I triple boot Windows with a Debian distro and an Arch distro. Windows is on one drive with its boot loader there so it doesn’t mess with the linux boot loaders and vice versa, and the two linux distros and their boot loaders are on a second drive. Just make sure Windows is already there and the linux boot loaders will pick it up.

        • bellsDoSing@lemm.ee
          2·
          11 months ago

          Yeah, AFAIR, the issue of “windows messing up grub” could happen when it’s installed on the same disk (e.g. on a laptop with one disk). Something about it overwriting the “MBR sector”. At least that was a problem back before UEFI.

          I too have been dual booting Windows 10 and Linux for many years now, each having their own physical disk, Linux one always being first in boot order. Not once did a Windows 10 update mess up grub for me with this setup.

    • JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      My current setup is two drives, a 500gb with windows and a 1tb sad with my Linux install on it. I set the 1tb to my first boot drive, so hopefully no windows shenanigans. I’m going to see if I can set up automatic backups soon just in case

  • Bluefruit@lemmy.world
    16·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • milkjug@lemmy.wildfyre.dev
      7·
      11 months ago

      This generally works for people who only need command-line or headless access though. I’ve been waiting for proper GPU virtualization and partitioning to actually work on consumer gpus for so long now that I’m doubtful it will ever be a thing. And the hardware industry has gradually transitioned to single GPU setups now so PCIe lanes for multi-GPU setups are harder to come by, especially with recent motherboards dedicating more and more PCIe lanes to NVMe slots. Still, even GPU pass-through with VFIO is not a trivial thing at all to get up and running. Its a travesty that CPU virtualization is so mature and far along in the consumer space, juxtaposed with a seemingly absolute big fat zero on the GPU virtualization front.

      You could get away with using VMWare for their proprietary GPU virtualization feature but besides simple sandboxes for testing, I will not personally get too far into it as the experience is not great.

        • milkjug@lemmy.wildfyre.dev
          1·
          11 months ago

          Great find! Thanks, this is new to me. I would have taken this out for a whirl immediately but I just read the docs and sadly it doesn’t support my 3000 series nvidia card. Team Green is seriously getting on my nerves for their anti consumer practices, enough for me to go all in into Team Red or Intel for my next GPU.

          At this point, Intel (if you’re listening), the single most important feature you can implement to get an immediate buy from me, is SR-IOV on your Arc cards. I will probably buy a few of them for each of my PCs as well.

    • uzay@infosec.pub
      4·
      11 months ago

      It only protects your data if you encrypt the virtual disk. And then you could still lose it to a ransomware attack.

  • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    91·
    11 months ago

    Be aware that Windows will snitch on you if you run it in a VM. I don’t know about Forkknife in particular, but if a game’s TOS prohibits it, or the anti-cheat is having a bad day, it might get you banned. There are ways to trick Windows into thinking it’s running on metal, but it’s always a risk.

      • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        11 months ago

        Taskmgr will literally list that the OS is running in a VM. You don’t need a rootkit to detect it.

    • JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      1·
      11 months ago

      That’s why I went with dual booting over a vm. Battleye and ez anti cheat both try to detect even Microsoft’s hyper-v.

      • Bolle@feddit.de
        4·
        11 months ago

        thats the reason i dont play those Games anymore(although i would love to). i cannot live with the fact, that i am not in charge on my own device

  • fxt_ryknow@lemmy.world
    61·
    11 months ago

    Personally I’m not a fan of dual booting. Admittedly it’s been many years since I have evn tried (now that virtualization is what it is), but when I did, grub would always break on me. It just wasn’t worth the hassle. Now to think of having to reboot to switch just makes me cringe. Lol

  • LoveSausage@lemmygrad.ml
    3·
    11 months ago

    I had an old windows AME install on a separate drive I forgot about. Updated grub in peppermint (Debian) voila all of the sudden my windows was added , no fuss at all. Simple nowadays

  • DaveedMee@beehaw.orgEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    i dual boot bc of the adobe software i use for work and wine/proton doesn’t work with the shit ton of skyrim mods I play with. straight up crashes.

    • Astaroth@lemm.ee
      2·
      11 months ago

      re: Skyrim, could just be that some SKSE mod you’re using needs some newer .net runtime or similar

      could also be not enough vram (even if you have enough ram wine/proton could have it’s vram allowance set too low)

       

      If you don’t already have one get a crashlogger, for SkyrimSE 1.5.97 I would recommend .NET Script Framework (and use SSE Engine Fixes skse64 preloader instead of DLL Plugin Loader)

       

      If you already knew about all this and still having issues then don’t mind me