I was talking to my dad yesterday and he talked about how he dual booted windows and Linux in his college days. I immediately left to download Ubuntu, I feel so dumb for forgetting it’s an option. I literally only use windows so I can play Fortnite with friends. PSA: you can have both Linux and Windows, or you can use a vm in Linux. Be (mostly) free from Microsoft’s clammy hands.
Things used to be a mess.
Dual booting back in the BIOS days was an ever going struggle as both operating systems wanted to own the bootloader. You could boot Linux from ntldr but you’d be better off having a recovery disk nearby tor the few times a year Windows patched its bootloader.
With UEFI, this is a problem of the past. Old Windows installs, upgraded from the BIOS days or installed in CSM compatibility mode, still used the MBR, which kept the dual booting problems going (you can’t easily chainload an MBR Windows install from UEFI).
Even with modern UEFI some motherboards decide to make life harder by only booting the fallback boot option rather than letting the OS register itself. These are broken implementations with the same problem MBR has, and lead to problems like “my OS won’t start unless I install my bootloader to this particular directory and file name” and then you have Linux and Windows fighting for control again.
Partitioning for Linux used to also suck, because MBR only allowed four real partitions. You could use extended partitions, but you needed a bootloader smart enough to see those to boot from that. With Linux taking at least two partitions in common configs (/boot, /) and Windows taking two or three (hidden volume, boot config volume, system volume), you’d almost certainly need to mess with extended partitions to get a dual boot working.
Linux NTFS support is still broken in some cases (recently corrupted a Windows 7 install through the Debian installer disk) so dual booting also involved managing certain partitions from certain operating systems.
These days, dual booting should be super easy to set up. You can even install Linux before installing Windows without making the installer crash or leaving your system unbootable. There are still challenges (Windows wants secure boot and fast resume on, Linux doesn’t) but they’re generally not that bad unless your hardware is broken (i.e. some WiFi cards don’t work/only work in Linux unless you reboot from Windows because the open source driver can’t get the firmware to load right).