Dual Booting Windows 11 and Fedora Silverblue / Kinoite - how to shrink my Windows partition and where to go from there?
Dual Booting Windows 11 and Fedora Silverblue / Kinoite - how to shrink my Windows partition and where to go from there?
Hello,
I'm quite new to the idea of dual-booting, and I have a new Lenovo Legion Slim 7 which I would like to dual-boot on.
I definitely know that Thinkpads have better Linux compatibility, but Thinkpads would not meet my main use case for this laptop (hence my choice). It's also got an Nvidia GTX 4060 in it, which will probably not be optimal from what I hear (so any tips on that are much appreciated as well!). At least it has an AMD Ryzen.
That being said, I would love to use Fedora Silverblue / Kinoite alongside Windows. I know the docs say it will come with some difficulties, but I am willing to give it a crack given some of the latest comments on the issue tracker (https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/284#issuecomment-1869828571).
How would I go about actually shrinking Windows 11 down to make space for Fedora? Is "partitioning" the right word to use here?
It seems there are a million tools out there for this, but I would like to try to avoid extra tools for it unless there is a really reputable and easy-to-use one (just to avoid bloat).
After I shrink the partition, is it then just a matter of running the installer and using automatic partitioning with the unused space left over after shrinking Windows?
I'm a developer, but honestly the simpler you can explain this process, the better (I'm a web developer with very little experience dual-booting anything at all and have no clue how this process should go down).
Thank you!
Edit: I'd also love to know what kind of issues the docs are actually warning about as far as dual-booting. Will Windows wipe the bootloader on update or will Silverblue / Kinoite wipe Windows out somehow? If it's Silverblue wiping Windows out, that may cause me to go with a different distro - but if Windows wipes Silverblue, it'll be annoying but not a deal breaker (I plan to use Silverblue / Kinoite for development exclusively, so everything will be on GitHub).
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If you don't mess with your EFI partitions and your windows partition you'll be fine. The windows built in partition manager works well and is good enough. If you're sitting with issues shrinking your partition, use the native Linux partition manager to do it when you boot from the USB. I'm not familiar with Fedora so I won't be able to help much there. If you do need to use the Fedora partition manager, make sure to disable bitlocker on windows for the drive before you do it. You can just enable it afterwards. Hope it helps!