Why didn't anyone remind me the dual booting exists?
I was talking to my dad yesterday and he talked about how he dual booted windows and Linux in his college days. I immediately left to download Ubuntu, I feel so dumb for forgetting it's an option. I literally only use windows so I can play Fortnite with friends. PSA: you can have both Linux and Windows, or you can use a vm in Linux. Be (mostly) free from Microsoft's clammy hands.
Partitioning is great with a boot partition for each OS,and linux chainloading to windows. Then I have aseparate NTFS drive as secondary drive in Windows and Linux, in case I need to work on data in either OS
I installed a second SSD into my new laptop and installed Debian on it. I set the new drive as the primary boot drive so windows doesnât get a say and only loads when I select it from the boot menu. This way windows canât trash the boot loader when it updates.
As others have said, I also highly recommend physically separate drives. I have found both Linux and Windows affect each other sometimes especially when you're getting your bearings with dual booting.
For instance, after running Linux the clock in Windows will be wrong. And Windows will eat the Linux boot partition especially after feature packs (formerly called service packs), which come out about 1-2/year.
Anecdotally I've been dual booting Windows 11/Linux on my laptop for a couple years and I've never had issues with Windows affecting the boot partition and I feel like this is much less common with EFI. You can even have a separate EFI partition for Linux and choose boot order from the BIOS.
I've always done partition based dual booting since I first started using Linux and the last time I remember having an issue with Windows fucking with boot setup was like early/mid 2010s and it's only happened a couple times in like 10 years of on and off dual booting.
Just install linux 2nd and have it probe foreign OS, and create a linux only boot partition. Grub will then make a chainloader entry to windows boot partition. Linux won't care if you select windows chainload option, and Windows won't know it ia being chainloaded. No OS overlap. just set Grub Boot entry as primary boot in BIOS, EFI.
Ah I gotcha. Another option im considering is using a separate pc for windows and using a kvm to switch between them. That may be a good option for you as well if you can swing it.
Be aware that Windows will snitch on you if you run it in a VM. I don't know about Forkknife in particular, but if a game's TOS prohibits it, or the anti-cheat is having a bad day, it might get you banned. There are ways to trick Windows into thinking it's running on metal, but it's always a risk.
Use Grub2Win (https://sourceforge.net/projects/grub2win/) whenever Windows manages to break dual booting. It'll stop fucking up afterwards, as it'll be installed within one of the windows boot partitions.
Personally I'm not a fan of dual booting. Admittedly it's been many years since I have evn tried (now that virtualization is what it is), but when I did, grub would always break on me. It just wasn't worth the hassle. Now to think of having to reboot to switch just makes me cringe. Lol