I stopped trying to dual boot entirely with all the problems it caused me. I’m surprised the community universally seems to recommend dual booting as an easy to setup option for beginners.
Easiest way to dual boot is 2 disks, with Linux and grub installed on 2nd disk, and BIOS set to boot to 2nd disk. That way Winblows thinks it is alone in the 1st disk of the system.
Even so had an issue a couple years back that Winblows messed up its own loader, by not placing the boot files in the reserved hidden partition but then configuring the boot as if it did… facepalm Took me a morning of trial and error figuring how Winblows boot to fix it…
Winblows is a cancer, but unfortunately it still is necessary for some gaming.
Only for the kind of gaming that is itself a cancer: the one that wants to install a rootkit “anticheat” on your system.
I have a steam deck since the launch of the device and even stuff like old C&C games run on it. Hell, the little guy is able to run even FF16!
Edit: typo
I have had a hell of a time trying to get Shadow Empire running. It’s the only title I have found that doesn’t have kernel-level anticheat that doesn’t work on Linux.
I tried running the games that I need Windork for some time ago, but got fed up tweaking the stuff. I’ll give it a try soon.
Btw, I only do PC gaming, no consoles or mobile.
You can do it with a partitioned single disk too. Just use different boot sector partitions for each OS, and don’t use a boot manager. Just set Linux as the default boot, and use the BIOS boot options if you want to boot into Windows.
I actually logged into Windows for the first time in 3 years a couple nights ago. I couldn’t get Arch to recognize my Kindle, so I needed to verify it was a hardware issue, and not a software issue. Booted into Windows, verified it wasn’t recognized, logged out. Fuck those bajillion updates it wants to install. I’m not installing them, especially since it’ll just try to trick me into installing Windows 11 again. It can stay 3, 6, or infinity years out of date for all I care. I’m never going to use it for long enough for security to be an issue.
Anyways, I digress. Use separate boot sectors and a single partitioned drive is adequate.
Yup
This is shit. But dual booting (on the same drive) has not been viable for decades. It inevitably becomes a mess. Just have windows on one drive and Linux on another if you can’t fully switch to Linux.
