I have a Lenovo Yoga running Windows 10 on a 1TB SSD and at some point will probably have to upgrade it to Windows 11. I use it for school and have to keep Windows on it for now because of what I’m currently doing. I want to start getting into Linux in hopes of making the switch sometime down the line. Is partitioning the disk and dual booting Windows/Linux a thing and is it possible/easy to do? If so, what distro would anyone recommend? (I’ve heard good things about Mint). Back in the day I had gotten bored one night, installed Ubuntu on an external drive and played around with it a very tiny bit before forgetting about it, but that’s the extent of my Linux knowledge, so kindly keep explanations ELI5 :)
Edit: Thank you everyone! You’ve given me lots of good advice and knowledge, some terms to Google, and some good places to start. I appreciate it! Looking forward to joining the wonderful world of Linux!
Thank you! This is all good advice. I’ve never actually used a VM but will have to do more research on installing and using one. When you (and everyone else here) say shrink the partition from inside windows, do you mean from within the disk management software? I’m familiar with that, having added extra drives on my other computers. I actually have 3 computers, 2 laptops and a gaming rig I built, but they both have Nvidia GPUs and I’ve heard so many bad things about Nvidia and Linux and I don’t want my first Linux experience to be fighting it out with those. If I like Linux I’ll probably switch one of my other computers over to Linux either entirely or on one of the second drives (both my other computers have 2 different drives).
Just to clarify, you don’t need to shrink your storage drive for any VM. I haven’t used Windows for so many years, that I can’t remember can you shrink your C:/ partition, so search for it from your preferred search engine.
For a Linux Newbie Nvidia should not cause problems. Pop_OS! releases their own .iso for their own made Nvidia drivers. Also other Nvidia driver named NVK should be available soon for any distro out of the box and it will remove most (if not all) Nvidia-related problems on Linux. But I bet most Linux-gamers uses Nvidia without issues anyway.
When you’re about to do your first dual booting attempt, I highly recommend to take a backup from your Windows install since it’s your first time so something unexplainable can go wrong.
Ps. Remember this until the rest of your life: no matter how you do it, Windows will always override and format your Linux ESP partition, so you have to always install Windows first and Linux second and preferably with its own ESP.
It is possible to install Windows later too, you just have to go around fixing stuff then. I would recommended just getting another drive if possible though, ssds are cheap as fuck. Then just unplug all but the one you want to overwrite and install whatever. Idiot proof.
Yes, indeed! The Linux installer will also offer to do this resizing, but the file system drivers in Linux are mostly painfully reverse engineered stuff, whereas Microsoft can actually write stable code. So it’s better to go to disk management and do the resizing there, so you don’t accidentally corrupt times
Nvidia stuff can work fine, but you’ll have to read up on it after installing Linux. For almost all hardware, you install a distro and all drivers are installed. On Windows, drivers are installed during first boot. On Linux, proprietary drivers, like Nvidia’s, need to be installed manually. How this is done, depends on the distro.
Pop_OS will install these drivers quite easily during install time. Ubuntu has a button in their software settings (“additional hardware”) where you can click one single box and the driver should work after a reboot. On other distros, you’ll need to check the distro specific instructions on how to install drivers.
I would not recommend following Nvidia’s guides, which will have a very Windows style howto involving downloading an installer, something thst very rarely happens on Linux. I would also avoid guides/Ask Ubuntu answers that have you insert random lines into config files. Depending on the distro, some terminal work may be required, but many “fixes” seem to involve adding configuration files and settings that haven’t been relevant for years because everyone copy/pastes old advice, and that can cause issues down the line. Generally, I think it’s probably best to try to stick close do official distro manuals as possible.
One other thing: you may have encountered angry discussions about X11 and Wayland here. The details probably aren’t very important for you, but your best bet is probably to use X11. That’s not the default for many distros, but luckily switching back is easy (just click a drop down on the login screen and select X11). Wayland does work on your hardware, but Nvidia’s mediocre software isn’t very good at supporting modern protocols such as Wayland, so crashes and freezes are more common than you would expect/hope.
These days even Nvidia laptops work fine on many distros, something that was almost impossible ten years ago. There are some challenges (mostly involving power management and Wayland) but games work fine as far as Linux gaming is involved.
Thanks! This is all good information and I appreciate you taking the time to write it all out for me!