I’ve used Windows my whole life, except for a 2006 Mac OS X I got when I was a kid, and I never thought about switching away from it. However, in recent times, I’ve grown to care more about FOSS and customizability, and I’m also a bit more tech-savvy than the average person, I’d say. As such, I’ve of course heard of Linux, and didn’t realize how simple it was to install certain distros until my brother installed Linux Mint on an old laptop he repaired. I want to play around with it and see if it’s something I’d be interested in, but at the moment I only have one computer, which is my laptop, and I don’t think it’d be a good idea to do a full switch over when all my important stuff is on here. As such, I’ve heard people talk about “dual booting” which from what I understand means having both Windows and Linux on the computer, and picking which to use on start up? This sounds like a perfect environment to play around with Linux, assign it like 50GB of space (Is that enough?) and see if I like it, but I’m very ignorant about a lot of things related to Linux, and don’t want to start playing around with something I don’t understand. Advice would be appreciated.
It seems that people have explained pretty much everything there is to explain. I’ll just like to add my 2 cents. For the install process you will need a USB with your distro of choice. You might see some people recommend Rufus. I’d recommend using Balena Etcher instead because it’s just so much easier.
No real difference but Etcher is cross platform
Install Windows first, then when you install Linux have it create its own boot partition, don’t use the windows one. Many distros (like OpenSUSE) probe for foreign OS and will add a chainloader entry into the Linux Grub menu. Set computer to boot to Grub. Windows will mever know about the handoff and it will leave your linux boot/efi alone. With a certain package installed you can also read write to NTFS so you can have a shared partition to pass files across during reboots to the other OS. i have run Linux like this for 7 years with no MS nonsense
Others have commented on the process. It’s easier than you think.
One thing that might confuse you at first (after successful install) is that when you change between operating systems, the system clock gets thrown off. That’s because Linux and Windows interpret the system time differently (local time vs UTC).
To match Windows behaviour in Linux run:
sudo timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clockTo match Linux behaviour in Windows you will need to edit the registry, I’ll leave that up to you to search.
