I’ve been happily Windows-free for about 5 years, but lately I need some Win-only software including a few games that don’t work at all on Linux. My main questions:

  • How to avoid Windows messing with my Linux install? Having a separate PC is not possible for me right now. I’m considering uninstalling grub and instead selecting the boot device I want from UEFI, idk if this is advisable though.

  • I’m also interested in how to get a Windows install that’s as minimal as possible: I don’t want to log in to a Microsoft account, I don’t want telemetry etc, I only want whatever is strictly required to make my system functional. The one thing I do want is Windows Defender cause ain’t no way I’m dealing with an antivirus.

  • Should I go for Win 11 or stick to 10?

Any tips or experiences are welcome!

Ps: I know this information is probably all out there, but I thought a post in this community about it would be useful for others as well.

UPDATE: I ended up going with a regular old dual boot using Windows 10 iot LTSC - there’s a few games I wanted to run and a driver as well so I chose to install directly on hardware as opposed to a VM. I created the install media using Ventoy, and UNPLUGGED EVERY OTHER DRIVE during installation except the one Windows was supposed to come on. Afterwards I had to boot in with a live Linux USB (the nice thing about Ventoy is that you can write multiple ISOs to your USB so it came in handy) to manually install rEFInd onto the original EFI partition that my Linux install uses, then I just had to set up the correct boot order in UEFI and everything is working. I also had to fuck around on the boot partition and with efibootmgr to remove all traces of grub so things don’t get tangled up which was a bit scary but things are working perfectly now.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    20 days ago

    Swappable hard drives

    I have a ThinkPad with easy access to the hard drive. It’s one screw, remove a small panel and slide out the hard drive, slide in a new hard drive and reinstall the panel and screw. It all takes about a minute.

    I have a drive for my Linux setup and another for windows.

    I gave up setting up dual boot setups because I’m not as skilled or capable and I’ve lost entire setups in the past due to updates and changes and it was constantly frustrating for me. So I figured that just swapping hard drives was the easiest for me. No configuration, no changes and neither OS can interfere with one another.

    I use my Linux as my daily driver for everything and windows when I need something from windows. I only ever use windows maybe once a month or once every second month. I spend more time regularly updating windows than in actually using it.

  • NutWrench@lemmy.ml
    2·
    20 days ago

    I’ve got two separate drives. Linux Mint on an SSD and Windows 10 on an older, mechanical drive. Leave the Windows drive alone. Make the Linux drive the first drive in your BIOS boot order, with the option to boot to Windows as your second drive.

    If your GRUB menu doesn’t show the Windows drive yet, run “sudo update-grub” to detect it. When your reboot, the bootloader should show both options.

  • CrabAndBroom@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    20 days ago

    One thing I’ve been trying lately that’s a bit different: I happen to have an old SSD that had an enclosure with it (kind of like this) which essentially turns it into an external USB drive.

    I then used Rufus to install Windows on that drive, using the “Windows To Go” option and also checking the option to not allow Windows to access the internal drives. That way, my laptop can just happily run Linux by itself, and if I need to use Windows for anything I can just plug the drive in, hit F12 on boot and choose to boot from that drive instead. The added bonus is that Windows also can’t mess with anything on my regular system or monkey about with the boot loader.

    I’ve only had it on there for about a week but it seems to be working perfectly fine so far!

    Oh and also Rufus gives you the option to start with a local account already set up, so you don’t have to do the MS online account bullshit. And then after install I used ShutUp10 to turn off as much telemetry as I could.

    • erwan@lemmy.ml
      1·
      19 days ago

      If I have a new PC with a blank hard drive, what should be the install order?

      Windows, then rEFInd, then Linux?

      • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
        1·
        18 days ago

        Linux, Win, rEFInd too. Windows is the destructive force here, so rEFInd should always go after it.

    • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      4·
      20 days ago

      I also recommend rEFInd for the bootloader if you don’t want to set anything up (and risk messing up). You don’t need to configure your boot entries, it scans for boot options and shows them with a graphical interface, so your Linux and Windows should just show up.

  • thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca
    5·
    20 days ago

    Is there a reason you need a dual book instance instead of a VM or even WINE?

    Unless you need direct access to hardware and if you have enough RAM, you can probably avoid dual booting altogether.

    • recarsion@discuss.tchncs.deOP
      2·
      20 days ago

      I exhausted the WINE route, some games I want to play don’t work with Proton no matter how much you tweak (the first time I’m running into this in a few years) as well as some additional software. There’s also a driver I need to run that’s technically available on Linux but it’s a reverse engineered solution developed by one guy so who knows if it’s gonna keep working.

      • pbjamm@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        20 days ago

        Dwarf Fortress runs fine in Linux. Are you telling me there are other video games?!?

      • superkret@feddit.org
        2·
        20 days ago

        developed by one guy so who knows if it’s gonna keep working.

        If that scares you, don’t look too far behind the curtain on any open source project.

  • rotopenguin@infosec.pubEnglish
    3·
    20 days ago

    Might as well go for Win11, you’re going to have to deal with it next year anyways.

    Windows doesn’t do minimal, it does whatever the hell it wants. There are some OOBE tricks to get a local account working.

    I have used the privacy.sexy app to strip down some of the most obnoxious Win11 bits - be warned that you have to disable defender to have it work. Is it doing bad things? Is MS doing incredibly shady shit with their detections? Who’s to say? When I turn on Defender afterwards, everything seems “fine”.

    There’s no need to get rid of grub, or play games with different boot drives. Get to know how EFI works. Look at efibootmgr’s output - that’s pretty much all that the firmware knows. The firmware has multiple entries consisting of a drive (magic device number), a program path (EFI\grub\grub_x64.efi), and maybe a string to pass along. There is a priority list (0003,0001,0002) which MS occasionally likes to re-arrange.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    3·
    20 days ago

    If by “these days” you mean a motherboard that supports UEFI, then it honestly doesn’t matter anymore. Your board controls the boot order, and there isn’t an MBR for Windows to mess with anymore. Just plan out your partitioning careful before hand, and if you plan on using a lot of files in both OS’s, make a plain storage partition that is easily mounted under Windows (NTFS does not count).

    Honestly, aside from a very scant number of apps or games, there isn’t a real need to dual boot anymore. If you can’t run something under Proton or Wine, having a Windows VM will get the job done.

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        1·
        20 days ago

        Well, you can really mount whatever works in Linux with ESL, so that’s an option. Linux does have native NTFS support in the kernel, but I wouldn’t suggest using it for read/write because it can’t repair itself. It will almost certainly corrupt over time.

        You can still use ext2fsd to use ext partitions in Windows I believe. FAT isn’t going to be the easiest to get along with more than likely.

  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    20 days ago

    I put windows 11 live on a £20 USB drive, and it hasn’t messed with my Linux install at all

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
    92·
    20 days ago

    The most painless way to dual-boot is to install something that’s not Windows alongside something else that’s not Windows.

  • stargazingpenguin@lemmy.zip
    1·
    20 days ago

    You can (at least the last time I ran an install) get both 10 and 11 installed without a Microsoft account, 11 just requires this process to do it. If you have an old ISO of 11 around it should allow a local account if you don’t connect to the internet, but they apparently patched that out now.