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Looking for a distro to dual boot with Win 11 (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I currently have a win 11 machine and would like to dual boot with Linux. Looking at some of the different options, it seems many aren't recommended for dual booting. Are there any that are?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

I'd suggest against dual booting not because it's difficult to setup, but because Windows WILL eventually wipe out your boot manager that Linux would install to boot both OSes. After 1-2 major Win updates, it usually also updates the bootmanager, overwriting your Linux one. So instead, I'd suggest you just buy a PCI nvme card ($12, if your PC doesn't have space for a 2nd one), add an nvme storage ssd ($35) on it, and then disconnect the Windows drive while you're installing Linux. Linux will then install the bootmanager on its own nvme only. Then, you re-connect the Windows drive, and then you can press F12 upon booting (well, it's usually f12 or f10), to tell your UEFI firmware which drive to boot each time (so basically, you'd use your firmware as your bootmanager, per-drive, instead of grub or windows boot manager as per-partition). This way, no one is stepping into the other's territory at any point.

I'd suggest you start with Linux Mint. You can burn a usb drive to test drive it before you do all that, to make sure it works well with your PC. I suggest you use the Edge version of it, that has a newer kernel (so it has a better chance of supporting your PC).