Linux, Dual Boot or Other Options?

EightImmortals on 21/01/2024 - 15:06

Was just after some feedback and maybe suggestions on how to better implement an idea.

I want to move my main pc over to linux, either Deepin or Mint cos I'm still a linux noob after all these years so want something fairly user friendly. I also want to keep my Windows 10 install for now. The Windows install is on an NVmE drive which is screwed under a mobo heatsink so bulk hassle to remove.

Are there any problems with installing a dual boot linux distro on this NVmE drive that I should be aware of?

If so, would this workaround be practical? I would install the Linux distro on another SSD and when I wanted to switch between Windows and Linux I would choose the boot up drive from the f11 boot select menu at startup?

Any other suggestions welcome.

Hardware as follows AMD 5600X cpu
Asrock 6800 challenger pro GPU
32gb ram
Asrock Steel legend X570 mobo

Cheers

Computing Linux

Comments

  • Mechz on 21/01/2024 - 15:19

    How much spare room on your nvme?

    Mint just gives you a nice screen every time you boot with the option to Windows or do nothing to boot to it.

    Same disk is not really an issue.

    • EightImmortals on 21/01/2024 - 15:24

      About 250gb free atm.

      • smashman42 on 21/01/2024 - 15:52
        +1

        that's not much space. not a prob for the linux distro but for windows growth/bloat, might be safer to use another SSD for linux. even if its an old smallish one (120gb+)

  • Switchblade88 on 21/01/2024 - 16:53
    +3

    If you're just using it to learn with and not run anything needing bare metal or hardware specific, a virtual machine might be a simpler, less risky first step. Also means you don't need to reinstall Windows and all your apps either.

    Either use the builtin hypervisor, or something like the free versions of VMWare or VirtualBox to set something up and install your preferred version of Linux to it. Also means you can have several on the go and see what the differences are and which flavour of Linux you like best.

    • EightImmortals on 21/01/2024 - 17:41
      +1

      Cheers, no I've been playing with VM's for a while and wanted to set it up as my main box.

      • Switchblade88 on 21/01/2024 - 17:50
        +2

        Ah, gotcha - in that case I'm out of my depth, as I've lost too much hair trying to sort out MBRs and dual boot failures since the Win98 days. Not sure on the current best practices unfortunately.

        • CascadeHush on 22/01/2024 - 21:33
          +1

          Yeah, I will never do a dual boot setup ever again. I wasted too much time in the late 90’s and early 00’s on this. It breaks too easily and is a nightmare to fix.

  • Loot N Plunder on 21/01/2024 - 19:06

    I don't know about that mother board but most have boot settings in the bios
    Boot into the bios and select the boot order this way you can install a linux ssd and choose this as your first boot option.

    • EightImmortals on 21/01/2024 - 19:09

      Thanks, will do that, can also F11 to select at startup.

  • realbargainhunter on 21/01/2024 - 21:40

    You could use an external SSD and install the OS (Linux distro of your choice). You can make it a permanent installation (by completing the install instead of using it a live USB boot). You just need to plug it to your USB port on your PC anytime you want to use it and then when you power on the machine, you can go to selecting the boot device and choose your Linux installed SSD to boot from. This is the easiest I've found so far (other than virtual environment) as I stopped doing the dual boot anymore and still wanted to keep my Windows machine as the main (BAU) machine. I've tried with Kali, Ubuntu and Debian till now and they all work well. I reckon Mint OS would be the same as it's based on Debian and Ubuntu. I haven't tried Deepin though.

  • pegaxs on 21/01/2024 - 22:22

    I run dual boot Mint with Win 10 in my daily NUC pc that I run about 95% on Mint and only run Windows to update devices for work that don’t have Linux update software or only support Windows.

    I had no problem installing both Mint and Windows on the same drive and I use an external drive for doing back ups to and only use the internal drive (nvme) for operating system and basic files (word documents, excel, apps and photos…) All the larger files and the like all go on the external storage and NAS.

    The best part of Mint if you can just use an external hard drive as the OS install location drive, so you don’t even need to use the internal hard drive for your Linux install. Hell, you can run Mint off a halfway decent USB 3.0 thumb drive if you really want.

    Just a word of warning though, a: make sure you back up and make a mirror of your windows drive if that goes pear shaped and you need to get it back. And b: windows is painful to go back to because Linux Mint is so easy to use and so much faster that by the time you need to go back to windows, it will need 3 hours worth of updates before you can use it.

  • iDroid on 21/01/2024 - 22:24

    Depending on what you want to do in Linux you could just use VIrtualBox and install it into a VM. Performance is not too bad and comes with some other benefits.

    Or even just spend $150 on a second hand Dell Optiplex and whack Linux on that and have a dedicated box.

  • djsweet on 21/01/2024 - 23:24

    How about Linux as your host and Windows as a VM? KVM is an excellent type 1 hypervisor that gives a good Windows experience.

  • jeeg on 22/01/2024 - 00:31

    about 1+ years ago, I switched to using Linux Mint as my daily driver. I now boot windows in a VM if I need to run certain apps that are not supported on Linux. Never got much success to dual booting. I used to also have windows in another partition that i can select which to boot from the bios but these days I think the VM works well enough for me.

  • OMGJL on 22/01/2024 - 03:06

    apart from one of my colleague who use FreeBSD, I never come across anyone using other POSIX OS as their main OS.

    There's little incentives. You almost always have better software alternative on Windows/Mac than Linux/Unix/BSD etc. My colleague use FreeBSD is because he needed very specific window/UI control that you can't do on Win/Mac easily, and he come from Unix background in his early days.

    The biggest benefit IMO is shell, but you get that on Mac, or you can use WSL on windows. If you need to cmake some software on linux to use, you are likely able to just do the same on Mac, if there's no better alternative in the first place….. And for gaming, it is almost required to rollback to Windows.

    As for natively install Linux and use it as main driver on your pc, best if you buy another SSD, with the benefit of separate drive and separate EFI partitions, you can press F11 in bios to choose which SSD to boot from, which will ensure Win/Linux drive separate from each other completely.

    Last time I was forced to use Linux (SSH into a server doesn't count) is when I need to compile my own OpenWRT image, and macos doesn't do it properly, adjusting environment will take more time than use a VM to install an Ubuntu copy.

    and last time I was forced to use Linux on bare metal is when I was doing my master course, back then pyTorch + CUDA doesn't run properly on windows.

  • EightImmortals on 22/01/2024 - 07:12

    Thanks all. :)

  • EightImmortals on 22/01/2024 - 13:57
    +1

    (OK, just finished installing Mint on a spare ssd installed in my main box….was nerve racking but I think I'll be OK… :) )

  • Clockwerk on 23/01/2024 - 23:08

    My old laptop is dualbooting Fedora and Windows for a year now and there’s been 0 problems for me. Just follow a dualboot guide on Youtube and you’ll be fine. There has been cases where a majors windows update will overwrite the Linux bootdrive but it’s an easy fix from what i’m told.

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