I’m looking to install Linux on our home laptop and see if I can convince my wife to migrate off Windows. Since I’m not sure there won’t be times we need or want to boot back into Windows, I want to set it up so we can dual boot. The laptop only has a spot for one drive however so I can’t use two drives and chose them with the bios. I know in the past Windows has been problematic with dual boot setups on a single drive, corrupting the boot drive following updates and what-not. I’d really like to avoid that if possible.

Any suggestions on how best to go about it, or something I should at least avoid because it’s known to be problematic?

  • Attacker94English
    4·
    2 months ago

    I know my wife is going to want to use Microsoft Word and Excel

    Has your wife tried out the libreoffice suite or the online version of office? If not I would highly recommend the former then the later if it doesn’t work out for you, as running ms office on Linux is officially impossible and unofficially a pain in the ass.

    and we always use this laptop for our taxes, so TurboTax

    If it must be turbotax, a VM or wine will be the move, if it doesn’t need to be, there is opentaxsolver, although I have no experience with any of these software suites.

    I have a feeling running from a USB drive will be way too slow.

    In general it should more than suffice, the only thing is load times will be high, but not unbereably so.

    • ReluctantMuskratOPEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Thanks. I forget about the online version of MS. That might be our fallback plan if we get desperate.