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!
Honestly, I always HATED dual-booting off one drive. It’s infuriating and Windows can and will fuck your boot loader. I always found it so much easier to just have two disks and select which one I wanted to boot from the quick-post boot menu, or hopefully have a grub that matches the windows drive. That way both disks stay agnostic of the boot partitions and partition types. When I was a runt in college I had a laptop with a drive tray back when those were a thing. Now I just run Windows in QEMU on my laptops.
Yep. Get a second drive for Windows. Far much less a hassle.
Even with separate drives, the Windows 8 -> Windows 10 update wiped all the GPT drives in my system