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Comment by snailmailman

5 hours ago

It is relatively easy to configure. Just install Linux after windows, and Linux will generally automatically setup a boot-selection screen for you. The installer should detect windows and even shrink the partitions for you.

You can install a prettier looking boot selection menu like rEFInd, but the default works just as well, and I think the mainstream distros all setup secure boot too. On my pc it was very easy, on my (8yr old) laptop I had to add some secure boot keys and the bios was very confusing, using terms that didn’t seem to match what they should have been.

My setup has worked almost entirely flawlessly and survived updates from both OSes. Only issue being “larger” windows feature updates putting windows back as the first OS in the list, but that happens maybe once or twice a year? And it’s a quick bios change to fix the order.

I've never had this experience dual-booting, neither with UEFI nor Grub. I've been using Linux for nearly 15 years, 13 of those dual booting. Dozens of systems from laptops to desktops. Windows would always purge the boot entries. I'd have to manually fix booting, constantly. This happened with Ubuntu, Arch Linux and recently NixOS and through all the Windows editions till 11. I had to install Windows for a lan party recently and lo and behold on the second day NixOS is gone from the boot list and unbootable. Nothing of value is lost when it gets purged, but it's a damn annoying tax to pay just to be able to play video games.

Luckily gaming now works well enough that the only reason to use Windows was gone. Well, apart from some online games played during lan parties.