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.

  • AshleyNyx@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    4·
    10 days ago

    I’m not an expert at this, so take this with a grain of salt, but I’m running windows 11 and linux on separate drives at the moment with separate bootloaders on their respective disks and everything seems to be fine, but I’m not sure about how it interacts with potentially upgrading windows versions.

    I’m pretty sure as long as windows keeps its own bootloader on its own drive then it shouldn’t interfere with linux at all, as even if it did update without permission it would still use that bootloader. But as I said I’ve not had experience with windows updating entire versions.

    If you’ve currently not installed windows, I would disconnect your drive containing linux first to ensure it doesn’t try to share the boot partition on that one, as that’s an issue I ran into when setting windows up. I had to wipe my linux drive after it messed up my backup snapshot stuff on linux because of that, and had to manually create a new partition on my windows drive and copy its boot files to resolve it, don’t be like me.

    I hope that helps a little, I’m sorry if it doesn’t fully answer your question.