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.

Sadly there's a few too many replies for my busy self to respond to. I'll say thanks for the help though, I appreciate it!

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
    7·
    1 year ago

    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

    • Ooops@kbin.social
      31·
      1 year ago

      There's one caveat here: The UEFI specification doesn't strictly require the ability to handle more than one EFI System Partition on a drive, so some simply don't. So this "use a separate boot partition"-method might fail on some computers that just don't recognize a second ESP on the same drive and only surely works with a whole separate drive for Linux.