it's really important to keep your windows partition available. that way you can go back to it from time to time to remind yourself how the peasants live.
Hey! No badmouthing peasants.
They grow your food.
If you're going to play something with anti-cheat, you'll most likely need Windows, because such games are not friendly with Linux. Also, not all games support Linux or work well with Wine/Proton.
I did Linux windows dualboot, just so i could go back to windows in case that... Not once went back and deleted the windows partition 3 months later
That was give or take 20 years ago
I removed Windows and all NTFS partitions (which had useful data so I had been mounting them on fuse) and recreated all partition tables on the HDDs previously partitioned by Windows.
That was after my UPS failed and showed me how much of a hassle NTFS is, even if you don't have pending writes.
I have stopped dual booting 2 years ago. I don't need the proprietary apps and most proprietary apps that I was using I already replaced with FOSS ones before I even switched to Linux (in fact the only proprietary application in my computer right now is Steam and some games), so my switch to it 3 years ago was seamless. I have never tried Windows 11 and hope to never touch Windows again. The only time I am dealing with Windows is when I am in school and dealing with my sister's computer.
If you really need Windows, you can run it in a VM.
I love the open source community.
I started dual booting again after making the switch when I wanted to play RedM, for modded rdo servers, and for tarkov. Aside from those very specific use cases, I don't touch it.
I have been dual booting for years now, even though I almost exclusively use Linux. I’ve been in the situation where I fucked up configuration and left my Linux in a not-so-good state. In these circumstances it was nice to know that I still had access a functioning computer while I figured out how to repair Linux. Sure, you can use your smart phone for basic digital necessities, but that’s not something I’d want to be forced to do.
Another thing you might need Windows for is helping family and friends troubleshoot their shit. I don’t know if that applies to you.
If disk space is not very constrained, then I’d always recommend dual booting. Shrink the Windows partition(s) to the bare minimum (add some head room) if need be.
Something I’ve never done personally, but which may be scary, is flashing the BIOS via Linux. Most vendors assume Windows in their software.
Helping friends and family troubleshoot is something I would still have to do. I always assumed that I would be able to fix any mistakes quickly enough with a live boot usb but having a working windows install to fall back on is a good idea.
Also, you can flash BIOS via an OS? I thought it could only be done from within the BIOS?
I have never had to manually flash a BIOS. Usually when I’ve seen it done, some program was executed in Windows that would prepare the flashing, then the computer would restart and flash the BIOS before restarting again.
I think what you saw was the usb getting flashed (like how you make an installable drive), rebooting to bios and flashing the bios from the usb. That's how I did it anyway.
Possible. I’m not proficient in the firmware realm. But since there was no external drive attached, that “installable drive” would have to have lived on the main drive.
If you might need Windows, then yeah sure dual boot. Best to put it on a separate drive. Windows can screw up the dual boot sometimes. I've had to do a full reinstall a number of times before because Windows breaks GRUB and I don't k ow how to fix it. Do whatever you want as long as you know what you're getting into. If there's no critical data involved then it doesnt matter if something breaks.
I still dual boot but I find myself in Windows less and less. Specifically what I use it for is a few games, Fusion 360 (my brother is happy with FreeCAD but it’s not what I’m familiar with), and I need to use Windows for OffSec exams because the invigilator software doesn’t work with Fedora.
I only realised that Windows was required for the OffSec exams about 6 hours before I was due to start, I was bloody glad I had that Windows install good to go when that happened (it’s a 24 hour exam, notoriously hard).
I dual boot between Windows 10 and Linux Mint, but mostly still use Windows for now.
From my experience, the tutorials on setting up the dual boots are usually done in virtual machines, or computers that already had linux on them. This is important to note because the setup processes might be different with slightly different steps. I had to manually setup the Mint partition sizes, a scary process when you are new to it.
Make sure to install Windows first, and create a blank partition allocated for Linux with the windows partition tool. Windows will outright ignore and not see any Linux systems installed, but will recognize its own partitions it makes.
Sorry for replying after only reading the header, will edit if I miss completely, but I've recently switched to Ubuntu on my laptop and Fedora on my desktop, and made the switch hard a couple of weeks ago with a week of dual testing on my . My old Surface Go has become a snappy little thing that is perfect for browsing, my desktop is lacking unsolicited installs and adds in the start menu, but otherwise just as useful for both work and gaming. And I acknowledge the privilege of being able to do my job from a browser, but I know Linux can cover many more complex needs. My only struggle has been Star Citizen, that I used a couple of hours to get working spread over the weeks since the switch, but fixed earlier today, running as perfect as it ever has tried to.
It's impressive that you mentioned one of my concerns not reading the body or my comment! Happy to hear that star citizen works well with enough work!
I’m in the process of (mostly) ditching Windows myself. I’m putting Linux on a separate drive, and then I’m going to upgrade my Windows 10 installation to Windows 11. My plan is to start everything on Linux, and only switch to Windows when I need something that I can’t make work on Linux.
This will also give me a fallback in case I break something in Linux so I have a working PC to use while I figure out what I did wrong.
Depends. What are you planning to do with your machine?
I made a comment with everything I am not 100% sure will work. Summarised here: Is there somewhere like protondb I can check to see how well windows only software works through wine, and how well does BYOND and Star Citizen work in linux (I know they do work, but have no idea how well).
You will only know how well these things work on your hardware and with your distro of choice when you test them. You might even have to test multiple distros (or find out why things don’t work and correct that yourself).
Sounds 100% like a dual-boot situation to me.
Every other time I hear someone mentioning dual booting between Windows and Linux, it's where M$ pushed out some update that borked the dual booting.
Personally, I'd recommend running Windows in a virtual machine instead, or Linux in a virtual machine, your choice whichever OS you want to run as the main host OS..
Update: I've looked through (almost) everything on my PC and my main concerns are:
There are some games I play that work well on linux (marked playable on deck) but have external utilities that I refuse to play it without, is there somewhere like protonDB I can check to see how well it runs through wine (and how to set it up with wine? I’m not very experienced with it)
https://appdb.winehq.org/ is the general wine equivalent of ProtonDB.
For those who play SS13, how well the new BYOND update works with linux, I’ve seen it working on steam deck but I don’t know how buggy it is.
I don't know how Byond works on Linux, but I know that there is SS14 which has Linux support.
I play both, unfortunately, even if BYOND works well on linux, I'm probably not going to be able to play it (old article but the attack hasn't ended yet)
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