Ideally, I would prefer to dual boot ( two different drives if necessary) Windows 11 and Linux Mint. From what I understand, the crap Microsoft is pulling now will prevent this. Is it because of bitlocker?

Either way, another option would be to dual boot windows 10 and Linux mint. I would keep Windows 10 offline, which is why I would prefer to dual boot Windows 11, since it and Linux would both be online.

So are either of these scenarios realistic?

I’d like to get answers before my post is deleted. So thank you in advance.

  • Eugenia@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    14 days ago

    Linux Mint’s boot option will eventually get over-written by Windows’ updates. You will lose the ability to load Mint, be it in a week’s time, in a month’s time, or a year’s time, but be sure, it will happen.

    The correct way to run Mint alongside Windows is to install Mint on a usb stick (non-live). Here’s how:

    1. Get TWO usb sticks. One to hold the bootable live iso (16 GB minimum), and one to install to (64 GB minimum).
    2. Go to BIOS and DISABLE the internal SSD that has Windows in it. At least DELL & Thinkpad laptops’ BIOSes can do this. This is important, otherwise Mint has a bug during installation where it always installs the bootloader on the internal SSD, EVEN if you explicitly tell it to do it on its own USB stick or partition. So it’s best for Mint to not be able to see temporarily the internal SSD.
    3. Boot with the burned usb stick, and install Mint on the other usb stick. You can select automatic installation, or you can do it manually: create a 1 GB fat32 /boot partition (make sure you give it the boot flag), 4 GB swap partition, and the rest / (root).
    4. Boot after installation with the newly installed usb (remove the installation usb) to make sure mint works well. Check webcam too, not just audio/wifi/bluetooth.
    5. Re-enable the internal SSD again.
    6. You can now boot on the installed usb during boot time by pressing f12, and selecting the usb stick instead of Windows.

    Note: You can choose to install Mint on a separate SSD if this is not a laptop, or an external SSD with enclosure. These will last more than a usb stick (the rewrites destroy the usb stick within a year or two in my experience). But it’s a good first start and it works overall well. I have done it that way 3 times so far, for laptops where we couldn’t change the emmc/ssd/hdd (in one of the laptops the ssd controller was dead, the other one had a bad emmc, and the other one was old and the usb stick was actually faster than the hard drive), so we installed on usb sticks.