I stopped trying to dual boot entirely with all the problems it caused me. I’m surprised the community universally seems to recommend dual booting as an easy to setup option for beginners.
Easiest way to dual boot is 2 disks, with Linux and grub installed on 2nd disk, and BIOS set to boot to 2nd disk. That way Winblows thinks it is alone in the 1st disk of the system.
Even so had an issue a couple years back that Winblows messed up its own loader, by not placing the boot files in the reserved hidden partition but then configuring the boot as if it did… facepalm Took me a morning of trial and error figuring how Winblows boot to fix it…
Winblows is a cancer, but unfortunately it still is necessary for some gaming.
Only for the kind of gaming that is itself a cancer: the one that wants to install a rootkit “anticheat” on your system.
I have a steam deck since the launch of the device and even stuff like old C&C games run on it. Hell, the little guy is able to run even FF16!
Edit: typo
I have had a hell of a time trying to get Shadow Empire running. It’s the only title I have found that doesn’t have kernel-level anticheat that doesn’t work on Linux.
Haven’t tried it myself, but people report they are getting it running following some steps in its protonDB page
There are still some obscure games that dont work ( or are hard enough to setup that i couldnt do it ) on linux regardless of anticheat. Sins of solar empire and knights and mechants in my case were particulary problematic if i remember correctly.
I tried running the games that I need Windork for some time ago, but got fed up tweaking the stuff. I’ll give it a try soon.
Btw, I only do PC gaming, no consoles or mobile.
My main gaming device is now a steam deck. I’ve run on it mostly everything I’m interested in. I reckon I don’t like competitive games, so I never tried lol or Fortnite or CoD or anything of the likes, but the deck at home is running from Genshin impact to Final Fantasy 14. No man’s sky, assassin’s creed odyssey, ff16 demo, and every indie I wanted to play.
And except for games like Genshin impact or honkai star rail (not for me but for my SO) which needed a different launcher and some small tweaking, the rest of the games have been running “out of the box”, doing no tweaking at all.
You can do it with a partitioned single disk too. Just use different boot sector partitions for each OS, and don’t use a boot manager. Just set Linux as the default boot, and use the BIOS boot options if you want to boot into Windows.
I actually logged into Windows for the first time in 3 years a couple nights ago. I couldn’t get Arch to recognize my Kindle, so I needed to verify it was a hardware issue, and not a software issue. Booted into Windows, verified it wasn’t recognized, logged out. Fuck those bajillion updates it wants to install. I’m not installing them, especially since it’ll just try to trick me into installing Windows 11 again. It can stay 3, 6, or infinity years out of date for all I care. I’m never going to use it for long enough for security to be an issue.
Anyways, I digress. Use separate boot sectors and a single partitioned drive is adequate.
Optimally we wouldn’t I think but it usually boils down to being the lesser evil.
Yeah, dual booting on a single drive causes more harm than good. It’s very annoying, and I’ve seen people think it’s Linux’s fault, saying “I can boot into Windows just fine.” It’s like saying a bully is the better kid since he never has dirty clothes.
Best solution is to format the C:\ drive and never touch any Microsoft product again. That is what I did 10 years ago.
The newly freed 40+GB are a nice bonus.
You also got rid of a lot of malware as a bonus. And your PC boots a lot faster now as well.
Cost me a few hours and ended up just disabling secure boot in the end. Wish I didn’t need MS for some programs.
Can’t you run them in a VM?
I did try that years ago, ran into performance issues and other bugs, and it wasn’t worth messing around with when dual booting is so simple. Might reconsider in the future if MS keeps messing up though.
I think somebody posted a guide about passing GPU function from the host to a guest VM (for example) with
vfio, so it’s certainly possible to get a more bare-metal experience!
Well that’s super obnoxious
Since moving to Linux this is at least the second time there have been issues with MS screwing up dual boot via grub. I switched to systemd-boot after the first incident, and thank goodness for that.
Ugh, I gotta boot into Windows later tonight to get some classwork stuff done and it’s gonna want to install crap since I haven’t booted it in a couple weeks. I’m running Bazzite (it’s Fedora based) on another drive and hopefully I don’t have to deal with this, based on what I’ve seen I think my setup will be fine. (Anyone in Minnesota want to sell me an older MacBook for cheap so I don’t have to deal with Windows for six more months?)
EDIT: I just bought a MacBook Pro from Free Geek Portland. Now what’s the best way to keep Windows from updating for the next two weeks?
Now what’s the best way to keep Windows from updating for the next two weeks?
Disable automatic updates with group policy
@brb @AlligatorBlizzard that also poses a great security risk since the majority of updated are security-related, even though they also break stuff
For just 2 weeks it’s probably fine but good disclaimer
Turn off automatic updates for Windows. There is no reason to allow it to automatically eat up an hour of your time when you just want to run some local program for 5 minutes and log the fuck out again. Just run security updates before doing any crazy web stuff.
I’ve got secure boot disabled so I’m good.
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I have windows in one machine and Linux on the other. And never shall the two interact.
Earlier I did duel boot, then I tried vm using windows in Linux , then VM linux in windows. Then I tried windows 11 with wsl. All of them had issues
What were the issues you’ve had with WSL? I’ve been happily using that for a while now.
It did not do background cron tasks over long periods, and, on top of that, the Linux kept crashing after a few hours. Particularly if the machine went to sleep
I had issues installing some things : after I learned to use docker desktop that was not so much an issue though. But, the docker desktop at that time kept crashing due to memory issues .
Additionally I had issues with Kubernetes, particularly the gateway, in windows ,that just worked in Linux
Also I had trouble managing tens of thousands of files in my code editor, phpstorm. I wanted the files on the Linux side but had issues despite running the editor on the windows side or Linux side. I had trouble using Linux tools when managed from my editor.
Also, when I tried it , I had some issues integrating Linux and windows gui together.
I think I would have had more success with all of these if I had more experience with the things that bothered me; and honestly phpstorm has always been a pain.
But I drifted more into Linux land and more or less gave up on windows except for games and connecting to other window machines .
But I was really impressed by the integration of wls, and spent many happy hours
