this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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I'm looking to finally use Linux properly and I'm planning to dual boot my laptop. There's enough storage to go around, and while I'm comfortable messing around I'd rather not have to run and buy a new device before school while fixing my current one.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VaIgbTOvAd0

This was the general guide I was planning to follow, just with KDE Plasma (or another KDE). I was going to keep windows the default, and boot into Linux as needed when I had time to learn and practice.

I assume it should be the near similar process for KDE Plasma?

I'm ok with things going wrong with the Linux install, but I'd like to keep the Windows install as safe as possible.

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[–] Frederic@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

First, if you have only one HD, you'll have to shrink your windows partition. You'll have maybe 4 partitions already on your disk, a 100MB fat one for EFI, a 16MB one unformatted, a few GB recovery one, and a big one with windows on it, you may have more. Booting on a linux USB stick or with the gparted ISO, you'll need to shrink your windows partition and let whatever the size you want, say 100GB, for your future linux, free.

You need to disable secure boot in your bios.

When installing linux, it will ask you for custom partitioning (it's your first install, play with it, if you don't like your partitions, want or not a swap, etc, you'll redo it later!). Create a 20GB partition for / the root, create the remaining (e.g. 80GB) for your /home, these are the mount point that the installer ask in the custom partitioning screen. You will need to select the 100MB EFI partition as EFI/ESP mount point and keep it like this, no formatting for this one, just select it. Continue install, it will ask if you want to install GRUB, say yes, on ESP/EFI.

You may need to go in your BIOS and have to change the boot option to properly boot in EFI/GRUB. On my PC the BIOS boot option can bypass EFI and directly boot windows partition so I never had GRUB appearing.

[–] Anticorp@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Keep the boot sectors for Linux and Windows separate. Windows loves to fubar the Linux boot instructions during update. They somehow still manage to break the Linux boot section even when it's on its own isolated sector, but it happens a lot less frequently.

AFAIK you can't use drive encryption when dual-booting on the same HDD.

[–] cynetri@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you use two drives, I'd highly recommend getting two different models of SSD because after around kernel version 5.18, the kernel will reject one of the "duplicates". Was a huge source of frustration when I started, and I had to use Mint for a while before finding out the problem (I'm on Arch now btw)

[–] lloram239@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Did you dd filesystems around? Unless you end up with two filesystems with the same UUID, which you can get by dding them, Linux really shouldn't care one way or another what model the SSD is.

[–] cynetri@midwest.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I didn't, and what I read online was sometimes SSD manufacturers just get lazy with consumer products and end up assigning the same UUID to a model of SSD, and I tested this by getting an SSD from a different manufacturer and, sure enough, it worked as intended.

This might be the post I found where I figured it out at (bugzilla.kernel.org)

[–] Swarfega@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Backup all your data

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