First post here, if this place isn’t for tech support, I’ll remove it.

I’ve heard dual booting Linux and Windows isn’t a good idea because Windows Update will nuke the Linux boot loader, so I’ve avoided doing that.

For a very long, technical, and complicated reason, I still need Windows because one piece of software that I absolutely MUST have is only compatible with Windows. No, there is no alternative software available for my use case; none, zero, not any, at all. I’ve already tried running it within many different VMs, using many different hypervisors, and I’ve already tried Wine; they aren’t an option, the software isn’t stable in those cases. I don’t want to get in the weeds about it, so please just accept that I NEED some version of Windows installed.

Since Windows 10 doesn’t receive updates anymore, can I dual boot Linux and Windows 10 without worrying about whether Windows Update will break anything?

I intend to keep Windows on one drive and Linux on another. Windows would only be used when I need to run this one specific program, which is maybe five or ten hours per week. The rest of the time, I’d be using Linux.

  • curbstickle@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    I don’t keep good enough track of windows updates to know whether dual boot would be an issue, but there is another option here.

    I use some proprietary tools for work that have zero chance of running on Linux. While I have a laptop for work, its… Too slow for most uses other than using it for calls and for doing presentations.

    So what I have set up is a few VMs on my proxmox hosts, but you van do this on the same machine if you want with qemu. I have an iso I’ve cleaned up for my use of Win 10, when I need to use an app I have a script that starts the VM, then I RDP into it. Most of them are CPU reliant, though the ones that do need the GPU heavily are in a VM with a pass through for a quadro.

    All the benefits of native operation with little to none of the windows headaches. I’m currently testing a few of them that now support 11 on a tiny11 build - less than 20GB in total for the IS and everything I’m running in there.

    The “drives” in the VM where everything gets stored are just mapped to the local proxmox host, so even though its writing to my NAS it just shows up as a D drive.

    I do recommend having the C drive be an image stored on an ssd though, it’ll be a much better experience than running it off a store on a NAS or something (which works just great for Linux VMs BTW).