JuniperTheory

Juniper Bug

@JuniperTheory

Just some bug!!!!

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Hi i'm Junebug, the bug from online. I'm very cool and everyone who has ever met me loves me.

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JuniperTheory
@JuniperTheory

Question for linux people:

Finally getting linux set up on my laptop, as i've wanted to have it setup for a while

But as I pull everything that's currently off my laptop into storage, i'm wondering: Why shouldn't I dual boot linux on my laptop and just leave a very small windows partition so that I can, if need be for some random important/work/etc thing, boot back into windows?

Like, what's the big huge disadvantage of doing this? It would help for me in a few potential rare emergencies, what's the big downside to it that means I shouldn't?

This wouldn't be me going "and i can use both!" I know that's a fast way to use neither and be annoyed, just leaving it open for if it's necessary

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in reply to @JuniperTheory's post:

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

in theory: nothing

in practice, for the last 27 years to date: it works until one of the OSes sneezes wrong and stomps on the other. people will tell you this doesn't happen anymore thanks to uefi etc but i beg to differ. I set up w10/fedora dual boot on my thinkpad a year ago and at first it worked fine, and then after a couple months the windows bootloader wasn't selectable from the UEFI boot selector anymore, it would just flicker and reboot. linux Did Something to it, idk what. i could still pick it from the grub menu and it worked, though.

recently i swapped the SSD and reinstalled both OSes, and it worked a couple times, and then a couple weeks later i went to boot windows and all it'll do is bluescreen. dunno why, don't care, just know I can't trust it.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

fwiw if your machine supports dual hard drives and you don't really need more than one, dollars to donuts a dual boot setup using two physically separate drives is going to be rock solid, you'll just have to rely on the firmware boot selector.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

Oh no no that would be a nothing solution lmao. I will say though, even if it's just a rando mid-range machine, if it's new enough to have m.2, do make sure you're 100% on it not having a second slot, they're surprisingly common. I imagine you already checked that, just wanted to make sure because I've been surprised by my own assumptions in this regard before lol. And of course if it's SATA era then it almost definitely doesn't

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sudo-EatPant
@sudo-EatPant

The thing that's dissuaded me from running dual boot again is the last time i had it set up on my nice laptop. Windows needed to update, so it restarted, the bootloader switched into linux, and somehow whatever the windows update was doing managed to break the linux system so it couldnt boot anymore. I didnt lose any files on it, and i could still boot windows fine, but linux would just fail to start

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lifning
@lifning

folks have covered the main issues - that being sometimes the dualboot setup breaks in one way or the other. but if you're concerned about needing Windows for a random emergency, maybe set up a virtual machine inside of Linux? VirtualBox is reasonably easy to get one going in.

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cadence
@cadence

Let's say you boot windows every month or so, that means every time it'll have a 1 month long backlog of updates that it'll begin downloading and installing in the background. This will make the rest of the computer noticably slower until the updates are done, particularly if it's an older model computer.

You'll also be sacrificing a fair amount of hard drive space since windows itself takes up like 20 GB with its installation and all its updates, though this can be manually optimised a bit.

For me it would be more trouble than it's worth to keep windows going. Have you considered reinstalling it in a virtual machine if you find you do need it?

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