I have tried to move my desktop to linux a few times now but there have always been issues, Its now got to the point where almost everything works well enough other than games. There isnt a way of running the games that I play on linux so that means I need windows for now.
I seriously considered running 2 computers, but that would mean my graphics card would be only usable with windows.
Virtualization isnt an option due to anticheat .
So my current best idea is to set up hibernation for windows and Linux, that way it can hibernate by saving the RAM to the disk, rebooting , loading windows that would then wake from hibernation for gaming and when I want to reboot again back to linux it can hibernate windows and come out of hibernation on linux.
If there is a better way of doing this more seamlessly or you see a problem with this setup it let me know, Also what is the best way of setting up hibernating Linux Mint?, its not something I’m familiar with.
Really depends on what your plans are, but main thing is that you have each OS on two separate drives. Still a decent chance windows will break dual boot at some point.
Hibernating to switch between OS’s can also be very buggy. But I don’t see why it’s not worth the try for you. Just make sure to back up critical data.
to set up windows you have to run a command to enable hiberation, it seems they removed it as a menu option in recent versions of windows 11.
powercfg.exe /hibernate on
then enabled it to hibernate when i press the power button.
I already had Windows 11 and Mint installs on separate SSDs already and by booting to the linux drive first it will bring up the bootloader that will let me select windows or linux to start so that all works fine,
You can avoid the breakage if you make sure each has its own boot loader on its own drive(windows cant break other os’ boot files if there on another drive separate from windows), and don’t try to have only one boot loader. If you do so you then use your bios’ boot drive selector to flip between, on my motherboard F8 at boot brings up a drive selector without fully entering bios and allows me to quickly switch.
Hibernating Linux, booting whatever else, then going back to the hibernated Linux system as if nothing happened should be easy enough. At least it works well in my experience. Can’t say about Windows, though; in my experience, a hibernated Windows system will take over the BIOS to prevent pressing any option keys, hence preventing you from booting any other system. On a Windows used only for gaming, that shouldn’t really matter, it should be reasonably quick shutting down, and booting back up.
The installer should have done it for you. If it didn’t, the particulars depend a bit on whether you have a dedicated swap partition of sufficient size, or otherwise which file system you’re putting your swap file on, and lastly, which bootloader you’re using.
Don’t be so sure about that. If Windows can write to it, it can mess it up. Having a backup of the EFI partition is a sensible thing.
I can get hibernation to work with windows and then boot into mint, shut down mint and wake up windows from hibernation so that part isn’t a problem, the issue is that all the hibernation guides for linux i can find need you to re-partition the drive and a load of other steps to make it work.
are there any linux distros with hibernation set up out the box?
I am using 2 separate SSDs for Linux and windows. using the Linux bootloader to boot into windows works fine you dont need to select the boot device each time
Last I looked into setting up SuSE Linux, I found its installer has tons of options, among which setting up hibernation for you.
My own setup is KDE Neon on a hand-crafted LVM-on-LUKS setup, with GRUB as the boot loader. Setting up hibernation amounted to adding a file /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume containing RESUME=uuid_of_swap_partition, and regenerating the initramfs. If you want to use a swap file, there are a few more steps. For Ubuntu-based distros (that should include Mint), a guide can be found here: