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?

  • I_Am_Jacks_____@lemmings.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • as_is_tradition@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • N3Cr0@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • mrvictory1@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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 talk post. 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.

  • TechAdmin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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.