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Dual Boot Best Practices?
(kbin.social)
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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I appreciate the tips, thank you. When you mention making a separate home partition in Linux: my understanding is that we unallocate hard drive space from Windows and, when we first install Linux, it will use that free space to make its own partition. Are you referring to another step, beyond that?
No, no, most Linux installers have the option to separate /home into it's own partition, because yesz you can put the /home directory on a separate partition and just mount it to /home on boot.
I looked into this little bit.
So on a 512gb hd an e.g. breakdown:
Windows 150gb
Linux / 30gb
Linux /home ? 70gb
Data (nfts format, shared with both os) 262gb (or whatever is actually left over)
(I'll have an external HD for games)
Yep, smth like that, I'd make /home like 90gb personally, but 70 is also fine. Also beware, format your external drive as exFAT, not ntfs. Linux can run games from an ntfs partition, steam cannot (it's been an issue for a while)
Huh. I was going to have an external HD for games with two partitions: a larger one for PC, formatted in ntfs, and a smaller one for Linux, for if I want to try gaming with it, and formatted in ext4. You're suggesting that both should be in exfat, instead?
My opinion. Keep it simple and don't use a separate partition for home. You never know which directory will be larger (home or root). Just keep a live USB handy so that you can repair the bootloader or fstab or whatever config that got messed up. Keeping a separate partition is not that helpful because even if you mess up, you can easily access your data within the same partition using a live USB.
You're keeping a common NTFS partition so my advice is to store everything there (downloads, documents, media files) unless it specifically requires a linux filesystem (like app images). So whatever will be left in your linux partitions will be smaller, both in size and number, so you can take a backup easily in case your OS doesn't boot.
I appreciate the input, thank you. When you say live USB, is it one that contains the original data used to create the distro — like, e.g. what I'd download from Mint? Or do you mean to just copy the whole LInux partition (given that it's small enough) onto a USB?
LiveUSB means a usb stick from which you can boot linux temporarily (in case of Ubuntu LiveUSB, the option says something like "try Ubuntu before installing") and which also provides you an option to install/reinstall the OS.
You can boot from a USB like that and still access and manipulate files on your SSD/HDD.
No hard requirement for it to be the same distro that you have installed, just convenient in case you want to reinstall.