I currently have 2 PCs which dual-boot from single drive:
- W10+Garuda on UEFI
- W10+Pop OS on previously CSM, now migrated to UEFI
I have used dual boot for 2 years and Windows never decided to play the boss and override Linux. In fact, some Linux distros overwrote existing bootloader and put their own in my experience. I didn’t have many problems and if I did, they were easy to fix. I even play Steam games from NTFS on both PCs. On the contrary, I heard many horror stories, dual booting is avoided and not recommended to newcomers by most users. How is your experience with dual booting Linux and Windows? Did Windows ever deleted Linux bootloader on updates for you?
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Windows has consistently nuked my bootloaders and installed its own bootloaders on random drives. I gave up dualbooting years ago.
I am lucky I assume
Haven’t dual-booted in like 10 years, so I don’t have hands-on experience with it, but AFAIK that’s not really a problem since UEFI, or a much less common one.
Back then, with legacy BIOS computers, it booted by directly executing the first sector of the hard drive. This meant that there could only be one bootloader per disk, and so if Windows thought its bootloader was supposed to be used and it had an update, it just overwrote it. Or it would think it’s been corrupted/infected.
Now with UEFI, it’s its own partition and it supports having more than one there out of the box, so unless your boot process depends on detecting the default one rather than exactly which executable is the default, even if Windows updates it own as well as the default bootloader for a disk, it should be fine. Or at the very least it’s so much easier to just go to the firmware setup and change it back without having to reinstall LILO/syslinux/GRUB.
I’m running Arch. My laptop (MSI GT76 Titan) has 3 nvme and 1 SATA drive connector. So I have the nvme set up for Linux and the SATA for windows because: why not?
I mainly use Windows for… nothing these days. I try to remember to boot to it to update it every couple months. But I haven’t actually DONE anything in Windows in a while. I use Steam in Linux and play games there like Jedi Survivor, The Last of Us, Stray, Control, Hitman, … without issue. No need for Windows for me.
I’ve found that the only way to dual boot reliably is to have windows installed on a separate, dedicated drive, and to keep all drives used by Linux air-gapped from the windows drive. Fast start and hibernate must also be disabled within windows to prevent it from putting hardware in an undefined state.
That being said, I haven’t actually found any regular use for the windows install in years. mostly just keep it around as a sort of backup failsafe, or just in case there is a game that refuses to work in Linux. 99 times out of 100 it simply just collects dust.
I kept Windows “just in case” because it had some sort of fake activated MS Office which I would lose access to if I uninstalled Windows, along with iTunes. I also used an exam website that claimed it wouldn’t work on anything but Windows & Chrome and Mac users would somehow always have problems so I couldn’t take the risk. Guess what, it is just fine on Firefox. (right next to a Windows VM, y’know, just in case) Now I see I could have chosen clean install in the installer and live on.
No issues, as long as you have two separate drives. In worst case, you have to change your boot settings in UEFI, after a kernel update.
But I failed setting up Windows and Linux, both with drive encryption on one single SSD. I guess my failing prevented me from locking myself out of the system.
I use a lot of Windows, but I usually end up wiping the Windows partition to free space within six months, when I dual boot.
The performance is so much better on Linux on the same hardware, I just don’t boot to Windows, unless it’s the only OS that I have installed.
On 2nd PC I will delete everything and install Arch, I should have done that years ago when I initially made the switch. 1st PC is shared so dual boot is the only way.
Oh, yeah, good point. I have done the same on a shared PC at some point. I recall being reasonably happy with that setup.
Ever since I switched to UEFI boot, Windows has never taken over the bootloader. With MBR, it happened all the damn time and was super annoying. I think as long as you’re not relying on the default/fallback UEFI boot location you’ll be fine.
Haven’t had a problem since I started using Linux full time in 2019 but I rarely boot to Windows (usually once every few months to update it). I have W10 and Kinoite (openSUSE before that) installed on separate SSDs. I used 2 EFI partitions (which I make backups of from time to time) on the respective drives the OSs are installed on.
I’ve been dual booting Windows/Linux for 4 years on the same drive - no issues whatsoever.
I think as long as you use two separate boot EFI partitions, you’re fine.
I don’t recall Windows ever touching linux bootloader but I imagine it could if you had it scan & repair any potential boot problems. Installing any OS can result in bootloader being changed so I’ve always installed Windows first & then Linux, especially if only have a single drive. When dual booting with dedicated drive for each OS I install in the same order but I change the drive boot order in BIOS between installs as well. After installs are done I leave drive boot order so Linux bootloader is default. I can change the drive boot order if I ever have a need to use Windows bootloader.
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FYI Windows 11 doesn’t need secure boot enabled, just secure boot available. You can disable it and not deal with the issues in your
TED talkpost. Even if this is no longer the case, Windows Update enforces hardware requirements only in yearly feature updates. In other words you can enable secure boot only once a year in worst case.
I’ll never do it again. It’s proven that eventually it will break one day and it’s not worth the hassle. I would rather physically switch drives than do a legit dual boot.
