40
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
40 points (90.0% liked)
Linux
57274 readers
1214 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Dual boot sucks because Windows likes to overwrite partitions critical to booting Linux without warning.
You could use Virtual Machine Manager (GUI frontend for QEMU/KVM, the most performant VM software on Linux). Here is a good guide on how to optimize the settings for a Windows 11 guest. I've used this guide to get SolidWorks, a CAD program, to work decent, so I assume other professional programs like Lightroom will run well too.
Dual boot isn't that bad if you just use separate drives; the issue is only with Windows and Linux on one drive.
It's not possible on all devices, but my laptop has dual NVMe slots, and I used to boot Linux off an SATA SSD and Windows off an NVMe on my desktop before getting rid of Windows and moving my Linux install to the NVMe drive. Never had a problem.
The only hiccup you'll probably run into is exorbitant storage prices, although you can probably opt for less storage (256GB or 512GB), you can still get well below $100 and have it be perfectly fine.
While 2 drives is better, you can safely dual boot on one drive by making 2 EFI boot partitions. Install Linux on its own EFI and the probe foreign OS will find windows and add it as a chain loading entry. Set UEFI to boot from Linux partition. Windows will ignore the 2nd EFI and only mess with it's own.
If windows promts to add a drive letter on first boot (to the new efi and Linux partitions) just decline and choose the option to ignore in the future.
This is only true if you boot Windows by switching the boot order in your bios, if you boot windows through grub or systemdboot, it is liable to overwrite files. That being said, keeping them on separate drives removes all but the afformentioned issue, so I would still highly recommend doing so if you plan on dual booting.
I usually use my device’s native boot menu these days; booting through GRUB usually triggers the Bitlocker screen.
separate drive with rEFInd as boot manager is fine. Windows will sometimes still alter the boot sequence to make it take priority, but that's a relatively quick fix and doesn't happen all that often.