this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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How reliable dual booting has been for you? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by mrvictory1@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.world
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I currently have 2 PCs which dual-boot from single drive:

  • W10+Garuda on UEFI
  • W10+Pop OS on previously CSM, now migrated to UEFI

I have used dual boot for 2 years and Windows never decided to play the boss and override Linux. In fact, some Linux distros overwrote existing bootloader and put their own in my experience. I didn't have many problems and if I did, they were easy to fix. I even play Steam games from NTFS on both PCs. On the contrary, I heard many horror stories, dual booting is avoided and not recommended to newcomers by most users. How is your experience with dual booting Linux and Windows? Did Windows ever deleted Linux bootloader on updates for you?

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[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 5 points 1 year ago

Haven't dual-booted in like 10 years, so I don't have hands-on experience with it, but AFAIK that's not really a problem since UEFI, or a much less common one.

Back then, with legacy BIOS computers, it booted by directly executing the first sector of the hard drive. This meant that there could only be one bootloader per disk, and so if Windows thought its bootloader was supposed to be used and it had an update, it just overwrote it. Or it would think it's been corrupted/infected.

Now with UEFI, it's its own partition and it supports having more than one there out of the box, so unless your boot process depends on detecting the default one rather than exactly which executable is the default, even if Windows updates it own as well as the default bootloader for a disk, it should be fine. Or at the very least it's so much easier to just go to the firmware setup and change it back without having to reinstall LILO/syslinux/GRUB.