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.
Always install Windows first then Linux in dualboot, otherwise microsoft messes with your boot area. Have a separate boot partition for Linux and some distros have foreign OS probe and will auto setup your grub menu to chainload to windows. This stops Windiws messing with your Linux boot partition since it has no clue it exists
I would now say never on the same disk. A shame because many laptops only have one slot. But Windows 11 may do anything and you never know what happens after a “Windows update”
Twice after a windows update I lost my bootloader menu and my laptop would boot straight into Windows. After the second time I just removed Windows. Some investigation revealed that “Windows does not support dual booting” which I believe translates to “we will ocationally cause issues that a beginner would struggle to fix in the hopes of them staying on Windows.” Just a theory. Separate drives for sure if you can. No idea if they still do this as it’s been years since I dual booted
They still do it (at least they did a couple months ago) and Windows even likes to erase or replace linux bootloaders when on separate drive in my experience.
Annoyed me enough to remove Windows too. I’ll never install that anywhere again
Yes its horrible. This may happen during their weird updates.
Interestingly you can swap drives Windows 11 and Fedora, it does “repair” bullshit at the beginning but works.
If you never update windows (which is so horrible that you actually need to consider that) you can first install it, shrink it and install Linux.
I’ve seen people talk about Windows messing up the Linux install. Have there been cases where the windows install itself was messed up after an update (or is it straight up “you never know” and anything can happen)
I only have one slot, and I’d prefer to not have to carry around a USB or external drive if I can avoid it. I’m ok with having to redo the Linux install/setup, and it might be nice practice anyway. But I definitely need to have windows running and stable for schoolwork.
I’ve never had an issue, outside of bios updates (see last paragraph). I’ve even booted into windows after hibernating in linux (but not the other way around, since I don’t let windows hibernate; not saying you can’t, just that I don’t), and everything was fine when i got back. I use a swap partition for hibernating, in case you’re curious.
I do try to make sure I’m watching when it reboots after a windows update (because linux is my default, so i have to select windows from the boot loader) just in case, but i’ve also fucked that up a time or two with no ill effects.
My one piece of advice is: once you get it working, take a picture of your bios settings. You may have to fix some settinga after bios updates, as they can get set back to the default values. I did not do this, and while it led to a very confusing afternoon due to my inexperience, it would have been a non-issue if I’d have taken some pictures and known to look at them.
So for me USB sticks dont even work on Secureboot, so you need to disable that.
Then you can shrink your windows partition and install Fedora or something in the rest. Only use the unallocated space.
I actually removed the windows Bootloader manually, the IT simply removed the Linux bootloader instead, lol.
Just incase you’re unaware, if you’re looking to learn Linux but keep the windows until you’re familiar enough with Linux, there is a way to install Linux in windows as a container, it’s called WSL 2.0
Might be easier for you to learn with, and if you brick it then you can just wipe the container and start again, takes minutes to do
This is probably better than dual booting. You’re learning the command line, which is the happiness foundation needed to enjoy linux.*
And then you are ready to install Ubuntu and use Snaps… I dont know. Yes its useful but for me the use of the command line comes with time.
WSL 2.0
I appreciate this, I’ve had WSL for a little while now. It did take some getting used to and I think I’m ready to give it a try for real now
The video missed one small, but very important thing: You need to disable fast boot in windows before mounting your windows partition in linux, otherwise it will get corrupted.
The reason for that is that windows doesn’t actually shut down if you tell it to by default and it leaves the drive in a dirty state. Windows itself can pick that back up and boot off of it, but linux won’t detect it. If you leave fast boot on, windows will run chkdsk on the next boot after using linux.
I found that out the hard way and got to not use my computer while it ran chkdsk on my 4TB HDD. It took 15 hours.
Boot with a live USB image first. Check and see if everything is working. Don’t be married to the first Linux distro you try.
That’s fair, I’ll take some time to explore them :)
This is really the best advice. Dual boot via USB. Once something clicks, then look at dual booting.
USB boot is the second most fun way to learn Linux. Esp with high speed 40Gbs flash, there isn’t a ton of reason not to.
However backing up then trashing your windows environment will really teach one — it is a commitment!! But the learning will defn happen, there is no turning back after the windows partition gets scratched and GRUB enters the scene.
“Monitor scan line cfg don’t fail me now!”
“Interesting, mobo WiFi is MIA. Where did that 20’ Ethernet cable go?”
“Audio device not found. Okkkkkl”
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use the app center
That’s a weird thing to call a package manager.
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Backup all your personal data on windows prior to attempting anything. On a separate disk and cloud if possible. For cloud backups, just pick the important stuff. No need to backup steam libraries since steam servers are the backup in this case.
Like others have said, if you can use a separate disk, do that. If you can’t do that and you just want to try out Linux, use a USB live disk to test hardware compatibility and the user experience, or if you have an old laptop or desktop that isn’t being used, load Linux on that first.
Pick a popular distro for better community support. If you have a recently released laptop (less than a year old) might want to pick a distro with newer kernel for better hardware support. My personal recommendations are Pop!_OS, Fedora (both gnome and KDE versions). Both work well on newer hardware. Others you might want to try are Linux Mint and Ubuntu.
After getting Linux installed, try and keep your home partition backed up, especially if Windows is on the same disk.
Try and use Flatpak for all your apps, flathub is the web “store” for Flatpak apps.
Be open to trying the Linux alternative to apps since the windows version might not be available.
This is a new OS so expecting things to work a certain way isn’t realistic.
Most of the time a GUI is available for what you need to do, but learning the terminal is super helpful and a lot of people prefer it once they make the switch.
When searching online, try to include your distro and its version. It will help narrow down results.
If you’re gaming, check ProtonDB for game compatibility, and be willing to tinker a bit.
If you do have Nvidia graphics, Pop!_OS and other distros that bake the drivers into the disk image or install process are better for beginners.
Opinion portion: Firefox is a better holistic choice over chromium based browsers (see Google’s web environment integrity aka DRM for the web). KDE is a great desktop for people who like the Windows workflow, but I prefer Gnome. Nvidia graphics are much less problematic these days, but I still prefer amd and Intel hardware.
Life is hard; everyone is doing their best; be hard on problems and soft on people.
Good luck ;)
Whatever you do, don’t cross the streams!
Install windows as usual. And then install your Linux distro. Quite alot of them give you the option to easily install alongside windows
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.
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)
Did you
ddfilesystems around? Unless you end up with two filesystems with the same UUID, which you can get bydding them, Linux really shouldn’t care one way or another what model the SSD is.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)
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.
Keep your Linux partition backed up! Windows update deleted my EXT4 partition and all Linux data on my laptop. (No, it wasn’t a Grub problem, the partition was gone.) There are reports this Microsoft BS going back years.
When was this?
About 7 months ago. A Google search will turn up other reports of the issue.
If your laptop has room for a second drive, it’s easiest to put Linux on its own drive.
Unfortunately there’s just the one slot. I’m going to keep that in mind for future purchases
So then if the drive is big enough, use the shitty windows partition manager and shrink the windows partition, leaving as much space as you want for Linux.
Also you can try Linux on a Live ISO or even install it on a USB stick, but with UEFI thats a pain.
