I’ve been using Linux since Red Hat 5.0 (predecessor to RHEL). I’ve also kept a dual boot setup that whole time, to play the odd Windows game (even though I stopped buying Windows games +/- 5 years ago). When I had Linux and Windows sharing the same drive, Windows would misbehave at least annually, wiping out my Linux bootloader. Since I began installing Linux and Windows on separate drives, I haven’t had a single problem, with either Windows 7, 8, or 10 overwriting my Linux distro.
IMHO, this works best when both OS’ are completely segregated. I will install Windows, remove that drive and then install Linux. Then, of course, I install both drives. I have Linux boot by default and rely on the boot menu in UEFI to boot Windows, whenever needed. Recently, I have also began using separate drives for games, with one drive formatted NTFS and the other ext4.
I like this modular approach, because while I have Linux installed on a NVMe M.2 drive, everything else is self contained on its SSD, which are mounted in an Icy Dock cage. I can easily remove an SSD (the Windows games SSD, for instance) from the drive cage and install a new SSD with a different OS and not interfere with any existing installs. Not everyone will want, or need this flexibility, but I like to tinker with different Linux distros, BSD, Haiku, and other odd stuff, so this approach has worked for me, for the past 6+ years, or so.
I’ve tinkered with GPU passthrough, but the newest spare GPU I have is an antique GTX780. Perhaps when Navi 20 becomes available I’ll bite the bullet and drop some cash on a new GPU to sit alongside my Vega card.
Yesterday i mentioned the UV500 but i looked again today and the WD green was even cheaper, so i picked up one of those, i’m definitely trying out this setup.
There are some users who prefer installing Linux on a dedicated HDD/SSD and boot via the motherboard/notebook’s boot-options than risking relying on a bootloader breakage or Windows 10’s Windows Update doing something insanely stupid.
From personal experience there have been cases of partition moving as Windows 10’s recovery partition prefers to be at the end of the disk–Windows usually resizes the drive partitions after major Windows 10 “feature updates” as the recovery partition is auto-upgraded(old recovery partition is removed after reboot). Weirdest experience of Windows 10 1803, had a 1TB drive shrink to 500 GB due to Windows screwing with partitions
Strange. I’ve never seen Windows resize or move a partition before. I’ve had Windows 10 installed on the same SSD since 2013 (upgraded from windows 8.1) and it’s always only used one single partition for the whole OS (except for the MBR at the very beginning of course). No recovery partitions.
I guess maybe it depends on how you set it up to begin with.
I think you should use grub. Where you have your OS does not matter. Select your linux install to boot with and if you want Windows to be your first you change that in your Grub config. Many mainboards won´t even give you the option to boot into the boot menu without pressing a button on every. single. boot.
What exactly should Windows be messing up, that it wasnt going to do either way you do that? You aren´t starting it on boot anyways. But at some point you will have to start it. Or why did you install it in the first places? Makes no difference how you do start it. Youll probably use its boot loader to start it. Just grub is more convinient to get a menu on boot. If the windows boot loader breaks things it breaks things, then it was going to break things independent from how you started it, in the end it will run it at some point (or no windows). Unless you somehow hacked your way around using the windows boot loader.
I think a lot depends on how reliable you need the system to be and what your intentions are down the road. Corrupting the windows install isn’t ‘hard’ to do in a dual boot system if you start messing around with multiple distributions. GRUB is sweet and you’ll always be able to get into Linux…but change UEFI partitioning or something and you’ll never get back into Windows without a clean install, which you may not be able to do unless you physically remove the Linux drive.
I have a dual boot laptop I love to death - but I don’t rely on it for anything and all the data is synced off the device. I wouldn’t do it for my workstation.
But that’s half the fun of Linux. Being able to figure out what’s wrong, and fixing it. Cause then it will never trouble you again. Windows is not so easy to fix half the time. And I used to be a Windows tech person myself.
That issue happened on my “work” desktop, it was a clean EFI install of Windows 10(1703) and between several updates the boot partition kept shrinking–I later found out on a Microsoft forum the restore partition rebuilds(compresses) the most recent build of Windows 10(it may have been 1709 or 1803). I never had Linux on the same drive, it was isolated OS installs which made it really “weird”.
Some motherboards you can set a boot delay or set alt-boot options.
I used Grub on my dads’ old Thinkpad and Windows 7, 8/8.1 and 10 would randomly remove it. In my dads’ situation the comment was “migrate to Linux, I’m sick of it”
This is what I faced in the past, trying to dual-boot on one of the newer laptops I used to use. That’s when I decided to just go straight Linux. No regrets.
You should be fine using separate drives. I’d recommend installing Windows first and Linux second (provably doesn’t matter if using separate drives but makes me feel more comfortable). The only time I’ve had issues dual booting was when sharing the grub boot loader.
Echoing what most others are saying, I’d give gaming on Linux a shot, dual booting (even on separate drives though not as often) Windows updates tend to beat up GRUB. General recommendation around that is if you are going to dualboot unplug the linux drive when not in use to protect it.
Once again though try gaming on Linux, you may be pleasantly surprised how wonderful of an experience it is now.
I myself use linux exclusively but the wife uses win 10
and automatic F#ck-update causes me no end of headaches having to keep going in and fixing things on her system.
setting up the seperate drives is the easiest method but as its been posted before set a bios password on the linux drive to prevent win-hosed from messing with it.
I’ve dual-booted my system for years, no real problems. One SSD per OS, and one shared HDD (NTFS format) for music, games, etc. Both SSD’s have their own bootloaders, and don’t “know about” each other. I use the UEFI menu to switch, and neither OS has ever stepped on the other.
I could never get the Windows disk hibernation thing to work, so I took the Windows boot drive out of my fstab. I can mount it at runtime (usertime? whatever) in the GUI without issues usually, but if you mount it at boot and filesystem isn’t clean, you get the whole emergency shell song and dance.
There’s been a lot of talk about Windows overwriting bootloaders (which I don’t doubt), but Linux isn’t so innocent either—I think the problem lies in the Ubuntu installer. It will overwrite the MBR of your primary drive, even if you’re installing to a different drive, without asking or telling you. I learned this the hard way while installing to a removable drive from my laptop. So remove any other drives in the system while installing OS’s (any OS), and you should be clear.
I also did dual boot for years however it makes it all too tempting to go back to the other platform when things get slightly difficult. i.e., fi you’re not careful you’ll just end up in limbo between the two for years.
Which is good and bad.
IMHO, everyone has a smartphone these days which you can use to google problems if you break your shit, and trying to work through issues is the only way you’re going to eventually switch properly.
The gaming/software situation these days IMHO is “close enough” that if a game (or application) doesn’t run either in Linux, Lutris or in a Windows VM i don’t bother.
Recently bought a nintendo switch to fill that gap as well.
I’d try single booting linux only, and run Windows inside a VM for any Windows only software you need and see if you can live with that. Avoids needing to reboot and getting tempted to run more stuff in Windows just because it is the currently booted OS and you don’t want to reboot.
I made the switch from windows to linux full-time because I accidentally set my linux drive as the primary in my UEFI, and couldn’t figure out how to change it back. If I forgot to press f12, my computer would default to linux; instead of rebooting, I just got used to the shell. It’s definitely less hardcore than putting windows in a VM, which forces you to keep the linux environment in working order to even boot windows, but don’t underestimate the laziness factor for keeping you using your current OS.
Perhaps when Navi 20 becomes available I’ll bite the bullet and drop some cash on a new GPU to sit alongside my Vega card.
