I’d had a dedicated windows drive for a little while… Maybe a bug and not malice, but the forced Windows 8 -> 10 upgrade deleted everything on my second drive that windows wasn’t installed on

I had two disks and windows still fucked my secure boot keys somehow in a way that I wasn’t able to fix so I had to reinstall the linux side. I turned secure boot off afterwards so should be fine now but it was a thing that happened.

I needed to know this about 5 years ago, when I lost a partition on my SSD because of a poorly done dual boot.

Why no Plan9? Are you even an OS enthusiast?

For desktop? Probably. For laptop, linux support can be awful, because manufacturers keep introducing hardware that don’t support standard drivers. Webcam? How about an IPU6 that needs kernel modules just to be detected and then special calibration files just so the image is not a stripey corrupted mess… How about no on-board sound because screw you I guess. How about a non standard USB controller so that you cannot even communicate over your USB ethernet dongle when the wifi is once again some special sauce non standard shit…

These are Dell and Lenovo Yoga machines at the University I work at. Some are absolute garbage where the USB is always powered and will drain the battery when the computer is turned off and no BIOS setting will disable this.

We are now looking into Tuxedo and Framework…

PS.: even windows has issues with these, where you have no touchpad and no USB anything (mouse, keyboard) until you somehow install a driver…

Absolutely not.

Signed, owner of half-supported hardware.

Unfortunately this is not true. If manufacturers do not support Linux, then it is up to dedicated community members to reverse engineer drivers. Much love to these amazing people ❤️

Things have gotten much better in recent years because now Linux is seen as a legitimate operating system and not just a platform for hobbyists.

Psht. I wish! This is wrong and will set people up for failure. There is absolutely hardware that will work well with Linux and hardware that will not.

I tend to run into problems with brand new laptops. Microphones don’t work, web cams don’t work, fingerprint readers don’t work.

I have a Dell Dell Pro next to me with a web cam that doesn’t work. Arch, btw.

I also have a Lenovo T14 where everything does work.

The point is you have to RESEARCH before you buy. Otherwise, you’re gonna get mad a Linux for not supporting your hardware, instead of being mad at yourself for not researching first.

Hardware that’s too old is problematic and hardware that’s too new can be problematic.

There’s still tons of devices where Linux doesn’t work properly with them.

My Intel wireless cards cannot maintain a 6ghz wireless connection for shit despite some of them being over 5 years old. And Intel. Latest stuff, older kernels, none work well. Oddly whatever version of Fedora I had worked the best. My wifi wasn’t unusable when 6ghz was an option. It only dropped to 5/2.4ghz once a minute instead of every 5-20 seconds.

That certainly helps.

In my case the solution is two EFI partitions.

Windows finds the first and doesn’t bother looking for a second one, which happens to contain grub and my efistubs.

Windows will go ahead and clear the UEFI menu sometimes, but manually booting an efi file and then re-adding the grub and stub boot entries is small compared to having my stuff actually deleted.

I believe dual boot is more feasible when you have more than one drive, so you don’t risk corrupting it. Another option to test a Linux distribution would be using virtual machines

That wasn’t “an incident.” The notion of Windows breaking Linux’s bootloader has been a known thing for at least a decade.

I have had Windows update completely obliterate my Linux partitions at least twice.

I’ve had windows nuke my bootloader at least thrice. Stopped dual booting a few years ago so I’m free of that nonsense.

I have had it break my bootloader when I was dual booting, if it wasn’t my main pc then I might risk it but I’m not rolling the dice on if windows decides to break it again.

Still it’s a really good idea to keep a rescue USB drive handy, for when windows decides to update it’s boot loader and blitzes your setup

This assumes windows is not maliciously checking for other bootloaders in order to fuck with them, which I’m not willing to give MS the benefit of the doubt on tbh.

Windows will know, its lik a cancer

This is the way. I just discovered this, but the lazy way. If I want windows, I mash f8 on startup to get the manual boot selection. I never start windows through grub (systemd-boot in my case). It has its own EFI partition.

Then Windows will fuck up the EFI entry itself. Easy to fix of course but a pain in the ass when you are just starting with Linux and have barely any idea other than reinstalling for the 10th time in a few weeks.

Grub refers to this as chainloading and I did it years ago successfully (though with windows 10). Everything has to be EFI boot so grub can see the windows bootloader.

Kirk : I use a computer with an AI assistant and 1 gb of free ram. How about you?

Homer : I have a normal computer that lets me do what I want with my hardware.

If you bought a store laptop, I’d bet those configuration signatures were recorded when it got imaged… for the police of course.

Why? I have an nvidia card and haven’t noticed any major issues. It hasn’t even bricked the system on a driver update in years now.

It used to be much, much worse. While some people still struggle a little with Nvidia on Linux, it seems perfectly usable in most distros and games by now.

Or just use QEMU/KVM wirh VirtIO extensions if you don’t need hardware rendering on Windows. Problem is most dual-booters I know use Windows to play games with kernel anti-cheat. Not much you can do to virtualize that

Why would you go from thing not working to Arch? Arch is about setting stuff manually up.

Windows isn’t there either. We’re just used to it.

Skill issue. Everything works for me. I use Arch btw

Honestly, I’d go for Mint instead of Zorin or Bazzite instead of SteamOS.

Those have treated me well in my light usage over the past few years.

On the other hand, I set up a dual boot with 1 of my 4 ssds being available to both OS just in case. That was 8 or so months ago, and I haven’t booted into Windows 10 once since then.

My 165hz monitors are fine at 165, and that was without any config (NobaraOS). All the games I actively play work fine, and the closest thing to an issue is have is my H.O.T.A.S. registering only 12 or so buttons/switches instead of the much larger amount it has, but i haven’t put any effort into figuring it out because I only use it for one game.

Experiences vary, but I feel like you’re judging a whole platform from choosing a simple Windows replacement then switching to one of the harder OS’s to setup.

There’s plenty designed more for gaming which seems to be your monitor setup.

I’ve used Ubuntu for years and it’s easy to install and widely supports all the things I need. Bazzite is also a great option. I’ve never been interested in Arch and SteamOS just came out for desktop so I’d rather not be an early adopter when Bazzite is already ironed out and waiting to be installed.

Love steamOS on my deck, but see no use for it on my Desktop atm.

Windows 11 is actually spyware garbage and I won’t have it in my house.

Havent tried out zorinOS but so far i never hat problems running games under Linux : steam + proton experimental just makes it as easy AS downloading via steam and hitting the play button - literally die nothing else (have used Linux mint first now Debian - Debian required a bit oft fiddeling for steam but not with individual games)

I’m sorry your delightful parody of failed install went over their heads, please continue posting your eccentric new-to-linux word art

For example:

We have two storages (e.g., SSD): /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.

Install Windows on /dev/sdb (so it creates its own ESP);

Install Linux on /dev/sda (so it creates its own ESP), with a normal/manual partitioning:
- /boot/ (for Kernels I have 4 GiB+);
- /boot/efi/ (commonly, from 128 to 512 MiB is enough);
- Here I normally also have a swap partition, and separate: /home/, /var/;
- Select Grub to be installed on the /dev/sda;

Boot the Grub in /dev/sda;

Update Grub within Linux, so it finds the Windows EFI on another drive via its os-prober.

Here, I believe efibootmgr should show the existing EFI, or you could check it manually in /boot/efi after.

Windows should operate on its own ESP it created on its own storage, and don’t overwrite the Grub.

At voila!

Then Windows will fuck up your EFI entries. Which is not a big deal if you know what you are doing but a completely different story for the audience you are explicitly addressing here when you even explain how to check those entries in the first place.

Also you did not actually mention that fastboot needs to be disabled in Windows, thus a clueless person will not understand the random hardware errors on Linux caused by not properly initialized devices and will blame Linux.

(And let’s not even talk about some of the really insane stuff like pre-installed Microsoft SecureBoot keys that brick you whole system when removed because idiotic OEMs signed their own hardware’s EFI drivers with the keys already pre-installed just because they can…)

So no, it’s not “quite odd to see so many people having the issue when Windows”. That’s what Windows is causing, often intentionally so. Is most of this easily fixable? Sure… But it’s a very effective deterrent for many people, so they never reach the point where they understand and be able to fix that stuff.