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!

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    5·
    7 months ago

    Windows likes to hijack the bootloader making it difficult to boot into Linux. I would make sure that Windows is installed first and have a live linux disk/jumpdrive available in case Windows decides to hijack the boot loader at a later date.

    This isn’t very common these days. The only bootloader it hijacks on a modern system is the fallback UEFI bootloader for when the motherboard configuration is broken or reset. Some distros also have Grub hijack this bootloader for broken motherboards, but nobody is right or wrong in that case…

    This was a huge pain in the MBR days, but these days it’s really not that bad. There are some broken motherboards out there, but I have to wonder how pleasant your experience will be running any kind of non-Windows OS on a motherboard thst doesn’t even function properly…

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
      3·
      7 months ago

      Yeah, this matches my experience. 10+ years ago, a windows update might randomly wipe out grub and I have to live boot and repair it. These days, my dual boot config has worked without issue for several years.