this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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What did you do with your file system? I haven’t tried to dual boot Linux yet but I think bothering with partitioning and file systems is keeping me from taking the plunge.
(BTW it reminds me of why I didn’t go to law school, I hated filling out the paperwork for even doing the LSAT and realized the whole job is that. Dealing with partitioning and file systems and shit seems miserable and it’s just the start.)
If you have the port and money for it, I'd recommend a separate drive for the second OS. Windows is kinda notorious for stomping over GRUB if you rely on partitions for your dual boot.
If you're worried about installing to the wrong drive on accident, you can always physically disconnect the existing drive until install is complete, then plug it back in and set the boot order in the mobo config.
Honestly just get a second drive
I could do that, but how does Linux see/interact with my Windows stuff? Am I double-installing games to run-as-Windows with something like Proton? (like a Linux install and a Windows install on the old drive?)
It doesn’t, they operate as two separate logical systems. You can still access your windows drive from your Linux OS, but you aren’t necessarily running anything off of that drive.
I would personally just reinstall everything on the Linux drive.
Linux can mount windows drives (I don't recommend it, but it can if you need a file).
Windows cannot mount Linux drives (in theory ext2fsd can do it but it's massive pain and it no longer works for me).
If you install a game, either it works on Linux out of the box (it's native) or it works under proton, in which case steam will take care of that for you in most cases and at worst you have to change a single setting. Visit protondb to learn what games work and don't work on Linux.
At first I dual booted with Windows and kept my games on the Windows drive. You can just tell steam the path to the games, after mounting the drive. Some games ran fine, some were a little more difficult or impossible to play, even when reported as working on protondb. The reason apparently was NTFS that wasn't playing nice. That was the moment I ditched Windows entirely.
Under the hood windows uses NTFS, while most Linux distros use EXT4. Linux can read NTFS, but Windows can't read EXT4 without some tweaks. So I thought my setup was good.
You can try this setup for yourself, it's a good intro IMO.
You can run it from a live USB, which is also the install media. It's not persistent, so if it restarts, you lose data. It's a good easy to say last year it without making any changes. Like others mentioned, I wouldn't dual boot.
As other people have said, you have to be carful with dual booting on the same drive with Windows. It doesn't play nice with others. To add on though, Linux can access your NTFS (or whatever) systems fine*. You can leave them as they are and access the same data on both systems, though Windows is not capable of reading most other filesystems.
*May require installing a package, but every distro I've tried could out of the box.
I had an old computer and Linux is all that I installed. Not everyone is going to have an extra computer to do that with. However, this computer is more than 10 years old. It was quite good at the time, but it's junk compared to modern ones. Yet, it is more responsive than my very nice modern laptop that's running Windows 10. It's not going to beat a new computer in a race to solve a computational model, but for streaming, browsing, and day-to-day stuff, the lack of bloat means things open quickly and UI elements respond immediately. There is probably a fair number of people with computers they think are useless that would actually work very well with Linux.
I see. I have some old computers kicking around, I actually just deployed a windows media server, but that could easily be a Linux server and probably should be. That system I could easily boot only Linux so that appeals.
The issue with my main PC is that it has multiple terabytes of windows -related stuff. I get how I could read the old drives but there are terabytes of games that I’d have to reinstall to do that on that computer (compatibility issues aside) it sounds like
I don't know about games. Steam stuff is supposed to work but it's something I do much anymore. I was referring more to casual use, Web browsing, streaming, emails. Ironically Linux now seems more suited than Windows to people who use computers for simple stuff.