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.
That’s not been quite true in a long time.
When it used to happen, there were a couple of issues involved.
It used to be that Linux identified partitions (“slices” of hard drive) by number, and when Windows changed its own layout in a way that caused that number to change, Linux could fail to boot. But these days partitions have a unique identifier that doesn’t change even when the layout of the hard drive does, and Linux uses these identifiers to keep track of its partitions. So this issue is gone.
It used to be that installing a boot loader involved taking over the first sector of the hard drive and OSes would fight over that sector on install and during updates. But these days there is a mechanism where OSes can put their individual loaders side by side in a special partition and the PC BIOS lets you choose which loader to use. At worst Windows can only update the default choice. It’s been known to do that, but it’s easy enough to change back. There are tools that let you do so right from inside Windows.
So yes, dual-booting Linux and Windows is safe and easy these days. Keeping them on separate drives isn’t even necessary anymore.