i use a different drive for my windows installation because that happened to often,
and i swear it once managed to wipe the bootloader on the linux drive.
i have no idea how it did that,
but i avoided starting windows using the grub entry since then.
Having two drives is sometimes not enough, either. I have no idea why, but anytime Windows installs for the first time or goes through a major update (not the small security patches, but the periodic feature releases) there's a random D20 dice throw to determine if it will randomly decide to create the bootloader and recovery partitions in another drive, even though your main installation isn't there.
I kid you not, Windows 10 once decided that my external SSD enclosure was the best place to put the bootloader.
This happened to me! Did an update, unplugged my eSATA and BAM! Can't find bootloader. I literally, physically facepalmed when I realized what happened. At least the old one still worked from the primary.
I've done a ton of Linux updates and this has never happened to me once (yet).
Windows has a lovely “feature” where it installs the bootloader on a secondary drive if there’s one connected. It doesn’t install it on drive 1 and drive 2, just drive 2. I always disconnect all secondary drives before installing windows for this very reason.
That said you can configure the windows bootloader to recognize your Linux (or grub) and just use that to manage booting two OSes and it’s less likely to not destroy things.
It's relatively quick and easy to fix if you have a live boot Linux usb stick ...and probably a second machine so you can Google what to do. It's just also rather worrying at the time.
My old thinkpads have this great feature where the hard drive is easilly accessible on the side, so I leave the cover off and just swap the drive to boot into a different os
iirc the last time it happened to me, i just needed to fix the uefi entry which wasnt that bad.
(just remember to have a usb stick with a live image ready)
if it were to overwrite your bootloader that would be a way harder fix.
It's the usual problem: if your employer IT refuses to budge, you get locked into a Windows (or Apple) ecosystem. I had the same. My solution was to remove myself from corporate IT, and use my own device.
I use workarounds for the interfaces with corporate:
MS Teams Linux client (sadly discontinued as of 2022) still works out of a jail, but the browser solution is also tested and ready as backup should I be forced
Webmail instead of a proper mail proram - that's a big trade-off, but I can work with it, as much as it sucks
Webex for conferencing (as it works properly with Firefox, contrary to many other solutions)
Web portals continue to work - even though sometimes I need a user agent switcher to pretend I am using chrome (fuck you @MS Teams)
The €10 I pay a year for Exquilla is worth its weight in gold. It's about the only thing on my system that's not FOSS, but I'm not even mad because it works. 9.5/10 would recommend.
Yes that's due to Exchange. Thank you for the pointer to Exquilla - I'd gladly be willing to pay for that out of my own pocket, but there's three problems:
closed source plugin, which I don't want on my machine if I can avoid it
convincing my company to expose EWS (unless OWA uses the same interface, which I doubt?)
On windows they make you install their annoying software to do driver updates and it sends random notifications and has a bunch of ads and other things I don't want when installing software.
I'm using kde5 on X. To my knowledge, the only issues you might have with Nvidia on Linux is if you want to use Wayland instead of X. Unless you are someone who refuses to use non-free drivers for philosophical reasons, but then you wouldn't be using Windows.
I've been running an Nvidia GPU for over 6 years now on Linux without issues.
I even am using a fairly recent 4070ti and was able to use it with proprietary drivers soon after launch and was running cyberpunk 2077 at 4k with high settings and ray tracing with an average 60fps with dsr.
I also use the cuda cores for running open source llms locally and have no issues there either.
It actually is worse than "that bad". Windows 2000 wasn't "that bad" - everything after that has gone downhill.
Objective reasons why Windows is extremely shitty:
with every new Windows version, the same settings are shuffled around and users have to re-learn the interfaces to find stuff they had been able to easily find before
bloatware
tons of software is shoved down your throat with opt-out options either not available, or you have to jump through literal hoops to get there
I mean I can take up issues with Linux as well. The driver support can be iffy at times, especially with Nvidia, gaming can be a challenge, depending on what game you're playing.
"Not that bad" is a phrase, which acknowledges issues but still contests something to be bad beyond acceptance.
Oh please, half the time on most computers after installing stock Windows you'll need to install the NIC drivers from a USB stick because you can't download drivers locally without a NIC. With Linux, it pretty works out the gate. Significant driver issues haven't been a real issue with Linux in about a decade.
Nvidia drivers are especially weird to use as an example. Since the advent of AI, Nvidia Linux support has vastly improved since most AI use cases require Linux. It's enterprise-ready at this point.
As for the games that don't work well - the binaries were only built for Windows, so Linux has to jump through hoops to run them. That's not Linux's fault, it's the fault of the game developers. Thanks to the FOSS community those hoops are only getting easier to jump through. Most of the games that don't work at all depend on some sort of horrific anti-cheat rootkit that any tech literate person should consider a dealbreaker even if they use Windows as a daily driver.
And the games that do work, which is most of the games on Steam at this point, perform better on Linux than Windows on the same hardware because they don't have to deal with the bloat of a Windows OS.
I guess if you can accept ads crammed into every nook and cranny of the OS, constantly fighting with Edge over your choice of browser, reduced battery life and system performace due to OS bloat, having every single aspect of your computing experience built around corporate profits rather than user experience, and buying a computer every few years because of planned obsolescence you could settle with a bad OS like Windows.
I always say, an OS is a tool, not a religion. I use Linux at home 98% of the time because it fits what I need to do and it's snappier than Windows on my hardware and gives me more control, or maybe I know better how to do certain things in Linux nowadays that I've left Windows mostly behind. I use Windows at work because that's what dictated, and also because MS Visio is only on Windows (I could use MacOS with Omnigraffle, but Macs are not available at my pay grade. Whatever). They pay me to work and be productive, and this means using Outlook/Teams, AD SSO integration with Edge, all the VPNs/network control/DLP agents. And luckily now I can use Linux subsystem in Windows, so I can work on the cli when I need to do something fancy.
They don't pay me to spend hours trying to find a way to work with their systems other than what's supported.
On the topic at hand (bootloader issues). Never had a problem personally, but Iast time I did proper dual booting (on the same drive) was with Windows8.1. Now I have different drives, with the bios configured to boot from the drive with Linux. If I want to boot on Windows 10 I actually have to change the boot sequence. And even then there is grub (from an old dual boot setup).
Picture this: you buy a car. You buy a new set of wheels/rims and a new radio system with Android and whatever. You also put some new carpets on the floor of the car. Now you need to take it for a simple routine maintenance and checkup at the car brand official shop. After a few hours you go back there to pick you car up and it has the stock wheels, stock radio, stock carpets and everything and you ask where the hell is your stuff and ALL of them on the shop look at you confused like if they never seen any different accessory on that car before other than the stock ones, or don't know what you are talking about. All they know is that the car is now "according to spec".
This is what it feels like after updating Windows with Linux in dual-boot on the same drive.
There was a time when Photoshop and other programs used a copy-protection scheme that overwrote parts of grub, causing the user not to be able to boot Linux or Windows.
They knew about it, and just DGAF. I don't remember their exact FAQ response, but it was something along the lines of "Photoshop is incompatible with GRUB. Don't dual boot if you use Photoshop."
Grub still has code for BIOS based installs that uses reed-solomon error correction at boot time to allow grub to continue to function even if parts of its core.img were clobbered by shitty copy protection schemes for Windows software.
With UEFI it’s waaayyyy less bad than it used to be. There is no more MBR in the traditional sense for windows to clobber. Windows and Linux can share an UEFI boot partition both dropping in their appropriate boot binaries.
Even if you install Linux and Windows on separate devices, unless you do something strange they will share the same UEFI boot partition.
Personally, I do 2 separate UEFI boot partitions. Grub is the default which can select the windows boot partition. Then Windows can do whatever it wants to it's own boot partition.
Man, when I first messed around with Linux I hosed the MBR more times than I can remember. Either through Windows smashing it with an update, or my dumb ass doing stupid shit in gparted.
Pretty sure I was able to recover the important files somehow, but my parents banished me to the old family desktop for that pretty quick.
By something strange, I assume you mean installing Windows on a disk with the other disks disconnected so Windows will create its EFI partition on that disk (since it's dumb and will create EFI partition on the first disk it finds, even if it's an HDD). Though UEFI doesn't mind, will still list all the bootloaders from different disks without any problems. You can even unplug and plug them as you wish, it still won't be corrupted this way.
You do need a separate EFI, even though linux finds EFI, otherwise windows update trashes it randomly and why the meme we see here exists, with separate EFI windows doesn't know about it. You can shutdown windows mid update and boot linux, then reboot back to windows and update will continue. Siloed System
Not during typically reboots, but when some windows update or autofile repair happens it thinks it is the only OS on that partition and does what it likes.
Yes. When you install Linux it will auto detect the Windows EFI partition and put boot stuff there by default, but then windows comes along and will randomly trash that setup. So during install don't go with the suggested option, instead use the partitioning tool to creat another small EFI boot partition elswhere on disk, leaving Windows EFI and OS paetitions as is. Also create your root and home partition(s).
Install to those partitions, then Linux should prompt for Probe Foreign OS and add a chainloader entry to your grub menu. This entry, when selected, points grub to windows EFI partition ID and hands off the boot process to Windows. Windows is unaware it has been chainloaded.
As long as you set BIOS to load directly from the LINUX EFI entry then you will boot to Grub with Linux/Windows Dual option...But technically it is not a true Dual Boot, it is a sequential boot I guess.
I have had this for 7 years on same install and boot between W10 and Linux daily. Windows has never touched my Linux EFI.
For something like OpenSUSE you go into YAST2-GUI and click the probe foreign OS and then it asks you if you want Windows or Linux as the default boot. But to do it manually you add a menu entry to /boot/grub2/custom.cfg. or in /etc/grub.d/40_custom. After editing this you will have to run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg which will compile all the grub info into /etc/grub2/grub.cfg
I believe the custom.cfg entries end up after the 40_custom entries that the OS may have included.
There is a persistent method entry if you did want to edit the /etc/grub2/grub.cfg directly, but probably not advised.
Here is my entry for Windows boot partition and location of MS boot. Also below that is a UEFI entry for geting back to the BIOS, not relevent to this topic, but just so you see how the menu entries are defined. In my system these are at the end of all the other Linux entries.
### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
menuentry 'Windows Boot Manager (on /dev/nvme0n1p2)' --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-efi-4E48-193F' {
insmod part_gpt
insmod fat
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 4E48-193F
chainloader /efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}
### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ###
### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_uefi-firmware ###
menuentry 'UEFI Firmware Settings' $menuentry_id_option 'uefi-firmware' {
fwsetup
}
I responded how to via another comment, but wanted to mention that you may have a chainload to Windows already with your dual boot, but the main point was using two EFI partitions and chainloading to the other one, so Windows isn't ever in charge of files in your linux boot partition
Heard you and that wouldn’t fly. Just like you’re not supposed to run Windows on mission critical systems like nuclear reactors (seriously, check the EULA), running multiple operating systems side by side is most likely out of a supported configuration and “use at your own risk”. You’d have zero standing or less for any sort of lawsuit.
But just because it is in the EULA doesn't make it legal. At a time where big tech is being kept under a microscope for antitrust regulation, I'd say that an OS that actively destroys other competing OSes on the machine it is installed on should be considered an unfair anti-competitor tactic.
Might not hold up legally, but it's still insane that the single largest vendor of operating systems cant figure out how to install a bootloader with playing russian roulette.
If I dual boot windows, I tend to disconnect my Linux drive any time I do anything on the Windows side. Even installing Windows fresh using default settings, it managed to completely erase my Linux disk to put the Windows bootloader on it even though I selected a completely different disk for the Windows OS. Won't be making that mistake again. And by mistake I mean dual booting Windows. That pile of spaghetti code gets a VM.
I got used to windows overwriting the MBR and could generally work around that. But the last time I tried windows/Linux dual boot, it was windows that got caught in a recovery loop after a windows update. Linux was fine. I was impressed at how thoroughly Windows had killed itself on a basic unmolested install. At that point I decided I was done with windows on bare metal unless it was the only thing running. Windows goes in the virtual sandbox or plays by itself.
I've been in tech since 2003 in some form or another, I'm right there with you in thinking XP feels recent. My daughter was 2 in 2018, so it's definitely felt super quick to me too.
ok so technically, the 2018 support was post wannacry? I want to say. I dont believe they totally supported it up until quite a few years prior to that.
Micro xp... I got that to run on a Intel 400mhz laptop with 32mb of mainboard soldered sdram chips. Nothing like a a operating system under 200mb installed with a GUI.
I know for a fact that my company's build process is twice as slow on Windows/WSL than on vanilla Linux. We have benchmarks from many different user environments.
For the rare occasion that I need Windows bare metal, I have a Windows 11 installation on a usb ssd originally installed via the Rufus Windows-To-Go option that I can just plug into the system and boot off it whenever I need it without it touching my uefi menu or partition on my internal drives. This way I can also use it on another machine if that need arises. Windows can even trim the usb drive it's running on. It pretty much works as if installed internally.
I just use rEFInd with auto discover turned on. I installed the windows bootloader onto my Linux boot partition and haven't had any issues with Windows overwriting my boot entries on update.
Nah, you just need to develop a custom EFI app to boot on it. This app then calls a server on your network which will answer whether to boot on Linux or Windows (or any OS installed really).
And voilà, you don't need to manually select the OS anymore (well, you still need to say to the server what to use, but you can do it beforehand, not during the boot)
Ugh, that's so annoying. Every time windows updates i have to open the BIOS and put ubuntu first on the boot order so it doesn't skip grub.
I Also have a drive that i can access on both linux and Windows and every so often Windows will make it inaccessible on Linux because it didn't fully unmount the drive.
I think their logic behind this complete bullshit is if they make it hard enough on you to dual boot, you'll just stick with windows. I switched over a year ago, never looking back and seeing posts like this one makes me feel even better about it.
This is why you don't duel boot. If Windows can't play nice with others it doesn't get to exist at all. Proton+Steam means there is never a reason to run windows at all. "But I need some non-game windows applications." K. Proton is able to reliably run games in a library of tens of thousands of games with all kinds of bad programming and obscure hardware use. It's a standard for being able to run windows apps in linux that is going to cover any other application you have.
There's definitely software that uses parts of the windows API that games don't touch. And doesn't work properly on Wine. I keep a windows install around just for using an analysis software for some lab equipment that refuses to start in wine.
Things like CAD software are also a struggle, though the latest wine seems to have resolved a number of graphics issues with getting PTC Creo to properly use the nvapi and nvidia graphics drivers through wine.
While wine is amazing, plenty of things don't work with it. Usually you don't need them, but if you do, you do
I have really been struggling to get proton to work in OpenSUSE, despite ProtonDB having only positive experience with the games I've attenpted. Running Tumbleweed X11 KDE with an 30 series Nvidia GPU. And in trying to fix them I seem to have broken my display drivers altogether. Plenty of system restarts, but all this happened without going into windows for a month. And that's why I dual boot 😢
I haven't run tumbleweed in a while, but I did have a similar issue on arch with X11 kde.
In the Nvidia settings, ensure that both Force Composition Pipeline and Force Full Composition Pipeline are disabled (unchecked) otherwise some games launched from steam using proton 8 or newer freezes on focus.
Obviously you'd have to fix your display drivers first. Maybe a reinstall is the quickest solution there.
Yeah, trying a Snapper restore since I'm out of things I know to look at, but that appears to be the next step. Thanks for the info on the Nvidia settings, is that in some config file?
Never trusted this setup to begin with because I didn't trust Microsoft and I'm not all that capable or want to take time to sort this stuff out on a regular basis.
So I just setup my ThinkPad laptop with two removable SSDs and I just swap one or the other whenever I need. The drive is easily switched, from power down, remove drive, insert other drive and restart only takes about two minutes.
I'm not going to risk messing up my setup because two operating systems can't work with one another.
Besides I seldom switch, I use Windows if I really have to about three or four times a year.
I really wish Excel would work on wine. It's the only reason I do occasionally fire up windows on my duel boot. (And no the open source / browser based spreadsheet options don't always suffice, brilliant as they are).
I recently had this issue needing to run Excel macros. I ended up using Oracle Virtualbox to run Windows from inside linux. Even more linuxey is using Proxmox to run your Windows VMs but that's a bit more of a faff.
That's what I'm doing too, running fine but when I reinstall windows for whatever reason (mainly for it being slow and buggy) I disconnect linux drive because one time it broke my grub by messing with efi partition (nothing unrepairable but annoying at least)
Only reason I keep a Windows install on an SSD for my laptop: my schools remote test proctoring service only works with Windows and Mac.
I normally run pop_os on it but switch to the windows when I have to take a test.
i need to remove my windows boot drive from my workstation, but it lives in a rack. And has a temperament. Sometimes when losing power shit just refuses to boot for like an hour, eventually it randomly boots. Still unsure why. Could be anything really. Best guess is bad cmos battery though. Could be slightly bunged bios, could be marginally fucky cpu. Who knows. It's fine when shutdown with power for long periods of time though.
Gotta love modern hardware, if only 7 segment displays weren't a 300 dollar privilege.
I have an old, spinning rust WinBlows, easily inserted in the ex-cdrom slot of my bathtub movie lenovo t440p, because once a year or so I need to upgrade the firmware of some crap that has no other option. Wastes about 24 hrs of (annoying but small) power updating each time. May this pass, in time. (like tears in rain :)
I should get around to imaging it onto a SSD, but I don't, due to distaste, and then I need it again. :(.
I have three ssd and none of them boot windows. I do have a windows vm (and macos too) in virt-manager in case I need it, but I haven't boot them for about a year.
Both my drives are the same Linux distro, I have Windows and MacOS in a VM when I need them, and Windows To Go for rare cases where I actually need to boot win11.
Unfortunately, Linux can't run everything *yet. What do you propose people do instead when they can't access the apps they need to play with friends or work?
I haven't had to use any exam software recently, but in the past when I did I remember reading that it can detect when the host is virtual and will not run in a VM. Fortunately at the time I still had a windows laptop lying around, but I'd have a real problem if one of a courses now tried to do this.
i have two other possibilities at hand, that do not involve two SSDs:
don't use intentionally broken software in the first place ;-)
use another device for bootloader, could be a readonly CD or a usb drive, PXE/bootp could also do it.
And if your company wants you to use rotten software, they also want you to give them the delays, downtimes and annoyances that naturally come with rotten decisions, just keep that in mind.
Here is one thing to remember and why i call it rotten software and rotten decisions:
Microsoft offers a free "blame the ransomware people" to any CTO who just wants to receive money without working at all or not having to "think" during work. That same CTO can get a bonus after "solving" the ransomware issue and then: "look how 'invaluable' that CTO is to the company" he "worked" for month ( yelling at engineers he previously told to install rotten software???) and resolved the ransomware issue!!
This is same to those who work. no law has ever given people that many payed breaks from work as "rotten software" vendors did.
and if you made a mistake and did not get trained before, you could blame bot beeing trained.
Look at it from a "fingerpointer" point of view, one cloud always blame someone else for everything and the only one to blame is too big to fail and also untouchable due to their army of darkness lawyers. thus anything happened? no one could be guilty AND be held responsible.
Also if one is slow at work, and so is his OS, obviously easy to blame someone else again.
so microsoft offers a "solution" to "boss wants you to work more and quicker" but remember, that same boss only "needs" a cover for his own ass to be able to point to someone else and the ones creating the rotten software do deliver that ;-)
i do not know any better wording for such a situation than "rotten" thus i name it so.
I have a real simple solution that involves not windows
i use a different drive for my windows installation because that happened to often,
and i swear it once managed to wipe the bootloader on the linux drive.
i have no idea how it did that,
but i avoided starting windows using the grub entry since then.
Having two drives is sometimes not enough, either. I have no idea why, but anytime Windows installs for the first time or goes through a major update (not the small security patches, but the periodic feature releases) there's a random D20 dice throw to determine if it will randomly decide to create the bootloader and recovery partitions in another drive, even though your main installation isn't there.
I kid you not, Windows 10 once decided that my external SSD enclosure was the best place to put the bootloader.
This happened to me! Did an update, unplugged my eSATA and BAM! Can't find bootloader. I literally, physically facepalmed when I realized what happened. At least the old one still worked from the primary.
I've done a ton of Linux updates and this has never happened to me once (yet).
Pfft, even 2 separate ssds for dual booting doesnt stop this from happening to me -___-
On the plus side, this is the first i recall hearing of someone encountering the same issue, so i guess i dont feel as alone now.
it stopped happening to me after i stopped using the grub entry to boot windows.
i now use my mainboards boot menu to select the windows entry when i need to boot it
Windows has a lovely “feature” where it installs the bootloader on a secondary drive if there’s one connected. It doesn’t install it on drive 1 and drive 2, just drive 2. I always disconnect all secondary drives before installing windows for this very reason.
That said you can configure the windows bootloader to recognize your Linux (or grub) and just use that to manage booting two OSes and it’s less likely to not destroy things.
How can you do that?
Something along the lines of this
Supposedly easybcd supports efi now so you should be able to use that to do all the config.
Is that actually easily fixable? Was planning to go dual-boot soon on my laptop and haven't even considered this scenario.
It's relatively quick and easy to fix if you have a live boot Linux usb stick ...and probably a second machine so you can Google what to do. It's just also rather worrying at the time.
My old thinkpads have this great feature where the hard drive is easilly accessible on the side, so I leave the cover off and just swap the drive to boot into a different os
iirc the last time it happened to me, i just needed to fix the uefi entry which wasnt that bad.
(just remember to have a usb stick with a live image ready)
if it were to overwrite your bootloader that would be a way harder fix.
i dont remember if the second ever happend to me
F
I swear at this point Windows users are collectively victims of Stockholm syndrome.
Yes, someone please come free us! I am being held hostage by Windows and Autodesk Inventor.
It's the usual problem: if your employer IT refuses to budge, you get locked into a Windows (or Apple) ecosystem. I had the same. My solution was to remove myself from corporate IT, and use my own device.
I use workarounds for the interfaces with corporate:
I take it webmail is due to Exchange-based mail?
The €10 I pay a year for Exquilla is worth its weight in gold. It's about the only thing on my system that's not FOSS, but I'm not even mad because it works. 9.5/10 would recommend.
Yes that's due to Exchange. Thank you for the pointer to Exquilla - I'd gladly be willing to pay for that out of my own pocket, but there's three problems:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/exchange-team-blog/retirement-of-exchange-web-services-in-exchange-online/ba-p/3924440
Quote:
There's mail apps for Linux. I think thunderbird is most popular.
My point was about corporate IT refusing to provide a mail server to the outside world.
So no IMAP/POP3 server or what do you mean? If so how does the web app work?
Webapp probably uses Exchange services internally and exposes only a web interface to the internet
Ah, I suppose that makes sense.
Or Nvidia GPU owners because Nvidia is fine on Windows but sucks on Linux.
On windows they make you install their annoying software to do driver updates and it sends random notifications and has a bunch of ads and other things I don't want when installing software.
I'm using kde5 on X. To my knowledge, the only issues you might have with Nvidia on Linux is if you want to use Wayland instead of X. Unless you are someone who refuses to use non-free drivers for philosophical reasons, but then you wouldn't be using Windows.
I've been running an Nvidia GPU for over 6 years now on Linux without issues.
I even am using a fairly recent 4070ti and was able to use it with proprietary drivers soon after launch and was running cyberpunk 2077 at 4k with high settings and ray tracing with an average 60fps with dsr.
I also use the cuda cores for running open source llms locally and have no issues there either.
using XWayland loads games fine for me in Wayland :)
So present-day technology instead of legacy crap.
Nothing wrong with using present-day technology as software if you want to use present-day graphics cards, is there?
Ummm...you think windows isn't legacy?
Hot take, windows isn't that bad (privacy issues aside).
It actually is worse than "that bad". Windows 2000 wasn't "that bad" - everything after that has gone downhill.
Objective reasons why Windows is extremely shitty:
It's always funny to me when people defend something by saying that it's "not that bad", because that still acknowledges that it is bad.
I mean I can take up issues with Linux as well. The driver support can be iffy at times, especially with Nvidia, gaming can be a challenge, depending on what game you're playing.
"Not that bad" is a phrase, which acknowledges issues but still contests something to be bad beyond acceptance.
Oh please, half the time on most computers after installing stock Windows you'll need to install the NIC drivers from a USB stick because you can't download drivers locally without a NIC. With Linux, it pretty works out the gate. Significant driver issues haven't been a real issue with Linux in about a decade.
Nvidia drivers are especially weird to use as an example. Since the advent of AI, Nvidia Linux support has vastly improved since most AI use cases require Linux. It's enterprise-ready at this point.
As for the games that don't work well - the binaries were only built for Windows, so Linux has to jump through hoops to run them. That's not Linux's fault, it's the fault of the game developers. Thanks to the FOSS community those hoops are only getting easier to jump through. Most of the games that don't work at all depend on some sort of horrific anti-cheat rootkit that any tech literate person should consider a dealbreaker even if they use Windows as a daily driver.
And the games that do work, which is most of the games on Steam at this point, perform better on Linux than Windows on the same hardware because they don't have to deal with the bloat of a Windows OS.
I guess if you can accept ads crammed into every nook and cranny of the OS, constantly fighting with Edge over your choice of browser, reduced battery life and system performace due to OS bloat, having every single aspect of your computing experience built around corporate profits rather than user experience, and buying a computer every few years because of planned obsolescence you could settle with a bad OS like Windows.
I always say, an OS is a tool, not a religion. I use Linux at home 98% of the time because it fits what I need to do and it's snappier than Windows on my hardware and gives me more control, or maybe I know better how to do certain things in Linux nowadays that I've left Windows mostly behind. I use Windows at work because that's what dictated, and also because MS Visio is only on Windows (I could use MacOS with Omnigraffle, but Macs are not available at my pay grade. Whatever). They pay me to work and be productive, and this means using Outlook/Teams, AD SSO integration with Edge, all the VPNs/network control/DLP agents. And luckily now I can use Linux subsystem in Windows, so I can work on the cli when I need to do something fancy. They don't pay me to spend hours trying to find a way to work with their systems other than what's supported.
On the topic at hand (bootloader issues). Never had a problem personally, but Iast time I did proper dual booting (on the same drive) was with Windows8.1. Now I have different drives, with the bios configured to boot from the drive with Linux. If I want to boot on Windows 10 I actually have to change the boot sequence. And even then there is grub (from an old dual boot setup).
Picture this: you buy a car. You buy a new set of wheels/rims and a new radio system with Android and whatever. You also put some new carpets on the floor of the car. Now you need to take it for a simple routine maintenance and checkup at the car brand official shop. After a few hours you go back there to pick you car up and it has the stock wheels, stock radio, stock carpets and everything and you ask where the hell is your stuff and ALL of them on the shop look at you confused like if they never seen any different accessory on that car before other than the stock ones, or don't know what you are talking about. All they know is that the car is now "according to spec".
This is what it feels like after updating Windows with Linux in dual-boot on the same drive.
It's at least gotten a bit better.
There was a time when Photoshop and other programs used a copy-protection scheme that overwrote parts of grub, causing the user not to be able to boot Linux or Windows.
They knew about it, and just DGAF. I don't remember their exact FAQ response, but it was something along the lines of "Photoshop is incompatible with GRUB. Don't dual boot if you use Photoshop."
Grub still has code for BIOS based installs that uses reed-solomon error correction at boot time to allow grub to continue to function even if parts of its core.img were clobbered by shitty copy protection schemes for Windows software.
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Do you happen to know where it's from?
Zombieland Saga.
Zombie girls are brought together to make an idol group by a sadistic madman who abuses the shit out of them.
Edit, the scene in question
I remember seeing the intro back when it came out. I wonder if I would like it. This kind of humor does make it seem good.
Sounds appropriate...
I have power switches for my drives. If I want to boot into windows, I turn that one on and the others off.
That's a really awesome idea. If I ever need an actual Windows install I'm totally going that route!
how do you do that ? physical switches ? do you buy them separately and solder them ? where ?
It's a physical switch board like this
https://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-Optimized-Controls-Provide-Longevity/dp/B00TZR3E70
Neat, had no idea this existed. Thanks !
With UEFI it’s waaayyyy less bad than it used to be. There is no more MBR in the traditional sense for windows to clobber. Windows and Linux can share an UEFI boot partition both dropping in their appropriate boot binaries.
Even if you install Linux and Windows on separate devices, unless you do something strange they will share the same UEFI boot partition.
Personally, I do 2 separate UEFI boot partitions. Grub is the default which can select the windows boot partition. Then Windows can do whatever it wants to it's own boot partition.
Man, when I first messed around with Linux I hosed the MBR more times than I can remember. Either through Windows smashing it with an update, or my dumb ass doing stupid shit in gparted.
Pretty sure I was able to recover the important files somehow, but my parents banished me to the old family desktop for that pretty quick.
Me too. Lol. It was almost a right of passage for people at the time.
By something strange, I assume you mean installing Windows on a disk with the other disks disconnected so Windows will create its EFI partition on that disk (since it's dumb and will create EFI partition on the first disk it finds, even if it's an HDD). Though UEFI doesn't mind, will still list all the bootloaders from different disks without any problems. You can even unplug and plug them as you wish, it still won't be corrupted this way.
Windows never knows the other partition exists and leaves it intact.
Could you give me more detail for step 3?
Don't even have to do that. Install windows first, then install Linux with refind bootloader on preferably a separate disk. Done
Did exactly that.
You do need a separate EFI, even though linux finds EFI, otherwise windows update trashes it randomly and why the meme we see here exists, with separate EFI windows doesn't know about it. You can shutdown windows mid update and boot linux, then reboot back to windows and update will continue. Siloed System
That's literally what I did yesterday with my method. It works, Windows has never trashed it
It will, thats why that meme exists.
Not during typically reboots, but when some windows update or autofile repair happens it thinks it is the only OS on that partition and does what it likes.
Nope, ran it like this for over 5 years. Definitely rebooted during updates / did some crap
Then you have been lucky, because most peoples experience with grub EFI on Windows partition is windows will eventually scrub it.
I installed arch so that didn't happen.
Not how it works
Yes. When you install Linux it will auto detect the Windows EFI partition and put boot stuff there by default, but then windows comes along and will randomly trash that setup. So during install don't go with the suggested option, instead use the partitioning tool to creat another small EFI boot partition elswhere on disk, leaving Windows EFI and OS paetitions as is. Also create your root and home partition(s). Install to those partitions, then Linux should prompt for Probe Foreign OS and add a chainloader entry to your grub menu. This entry, when selected, points grub to windows EFI partition ID and hands off the boot process to Windows. Windows is unaware it has been chainloaded. As long as you set BIOS to load directly from the LINUX EFI entry then you will boot to Grub with Linux/Windows Dual option...But technically it is not a true Dual Boot, it is a sequential boot I guess. I have had this for 7 years on same install and boot between W10 and Linux daily. Windows has never touched my Linux EFI.
How to add chainloader entry to grub?
For something like OpenSUSE you go into YAST2-GUI and click the probe foreign OS and then it asks you if you want Windows or Linux as the default boot. But to do it manually you add a menu entry to /boot/grub2/custom.cfg. or in /etc/grub.d/40_custom. After editing this you will have to run grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg which will compile all the grub info into /etc/grub2/grub.cfg I believe the custom.cfg entries end up after the 40_custom entries that the OS may have included. There is a persistent method entry if you did want to edit the /etc/grub2/grub.cfg directly, but probably not advised.
Here is my entry for Windows boot partition and location of MS boot. Also below that is a UEFI entry for geting back to the BIOS, not relevent to this topic, but just so you see how the menu entries are defined. In my system these are at the end of all the other Linux entries.
I responded how to via another comment, but wanted to mention that you may have a chainload to Windows already with your dual boot, but the main point was using two EFI partitions and chainloading to the other one, so Windows isn't ever in charge of files in your linux boot partition
Hear me out: Class action lawsuit
Heard you and that wouldn’t fly. Just like you’re not supposed to run Windows on mission critical systems like nuclear reactors (seriously, check the EULA), running multiple operating systems side by side is most likely out of a supported configuration and “use at your own risk”. You’d have zero standing or less for any sort of lawsuit.
But just because it is in the EULA doesn't make it legal. At a time where big tech is being kept under a microscope for antitrust regulation, I'd say that an OS that actively destroys other competing OSes on the machine it is installed on should be considered an unfair anti-competitor tactic.
Idk why you think they have to support this. It'd be one thing if it was malicious but I really doubt it is.
Might not hold up legally, but it's still insane that the single largest vendor of operating systems cant figure out how to install a bootloader with playing russian roulette.
It's malicious.
If I dual boot windows, I tend to disconnect my Linux drive any time I do anything on the Windows side. Even installing Windows fresh using default settings, it managed to completely erase my Linux disk to put the Windows bootloader on it even though I selected a completely different disk for the Windows OS. Won't be making that mistake again. And by mistake I mean dual booting Windows. That pile of spaghetti code gets a VM.
windows installing its bootloader on a completely separate drive is such a weird and fucking idiotic issue for it to have.
... on a proxmox host in another room.
I got used to windows overwriting the MBR and could generally work around that. But the last time I tried windows/Linux dual boot, it was windows that got caught in a recovery loop after a windows update. Linux was fine. I was impressed at how thoroughly Windows had killed itself on a basic unmolested install. At that point I decided I was done with windows on bare metal unless it was the only thing running. Windows goes in the virtual sandbox or plays by itself.
Two ssds is when you need to run stuff on windows that requires the bare metal.
Windows needs to be contained, controlled and told who is the boss, I suggest using Tiny11 or MicroXP in a VM for stuff that can't run in wine.
MicroXP!? What year is it!?
Firefox stopped supporting XP in 2018 so it's not too long ago that it was still usable.
6 years was "not too long ago", eh? Right this way grandpa, let's get you back to your rocking chair
Okay it's long for people where it's 6 years ago they learned to tie their shoes.
Gramps here still thinks LOTR is a recent movie.
I've been in tech since 2003 in some form or another, I'm right there with you in thinking XP feels recent. My daughter was 2 in 2018, so it's definitely felt super quick to me too.
ok so technically, the 2018 support was post wannacry? I want to say. I dont believe they totally supported it up until quite a few years prior to that.
I was struggling to find the newest XP related news to prove my point, it was the best I could do.
By 2018 XP had been replaced by Windows 7 for several years.
yeah. Win 7 was released in like 2009? Win 10 was 2015.
Win xp was probably discontinued the same time as win 7.
Micro xp... I got that to run on a Intel 400mhz laptop with 32mb of mainboard soldered sdram chips. Nothing like a a operating system under 200mb installed with a GUI.
Windows actually works better in a vm on Linux than on bare metal. And it's got a much smaller chance of breaking my PC that way too.
Linux actually works better inside WSL in Windows.
Nooooooo!!!!
🤮
This is dangerous misinformation.
This is the correct information.
I know for a fact that my company's build process is twice as slow on Windows/WSL than on vanilla Linux. We have benchmarks from many different user environments.
Linux running inside WSL on Windows is the only thing that makes Windows usable.
FIFY
For the rare occasion that I need Windows bare metal, I have a Windows 11 installation on a usb ssd originally installed via the Rufus Windows-To-Go option that I can just plug into the system and boot off it whenever I need it without it touching my uefi menu or partition on my internal drives. This way I can also use it on another machine if that need arises. Windows can even trim the usb drive it's running on. It pretty much works as if installed internally.
And one day, we will have updates that will tell us "Windows have fixed a drive with partition table issues."
Don't wait for that day. Unplug all secondaries before booting into Win
Best is when it messes up it's own bootloader at the same time lol.
Remember kids, if you're gonna dual boot, stay safe, use 2 drives, and pray you're fast enough to mash the boot menu button when you power on.
I just use rEFInd with auto discover turned on. I installed the windows bootloader onto my Linux boot partition and haven't had any issues with Windows overwriting my boot entries on update.
Just press and hold the button as the computer boots!
Or just set your BIOS to take you to the boot menu on startup so you don't have to pound keys like a barbarian.
Nah, you just need to develop a custom EFI app to boot on it. This app then calls a server on your network which will answer whether to boot on Linux or Windows (or any OS installed really).
And voilà, you don't need to manually select the OS anymore (well, you still need to say to the server what to use, but you can do it beforehand, not during the boot)
Or maybe I share a computer with my partner that absolutely does not want to see a boot menu when they turn on the computer.
Don't forget to wrap it before you stick it in.
Ugh, that's so annoying. Every time windows updates i have to open the BIOS and put ubuntu first on the boot order so it doesn't skip grub.
I Also have a drive that i can access on both linux and Windows and every so often Windows will make it inaccessible on Linux because it didn't fully unmount the drive.
It's crazy that the OS has access to the BIOS in a R/W mode at all. Gaping security hole.
Easy solution if you only have one SSD: instead of installing Windows as your second OS, install a different Linux distro.
And while you're at it, install a third distro
Why stop there?
Finally another beeing experiencing this issue..i wiped windows after this incident and never looked back
I think their logic behind this complete bullshit is if they make it hard enough on you to dual boot, you'll just stick with windows. I switched over a year ago, never looking back and seeing posts like this one makes me feel even better about it.
This is why you don't duel boot. If Windows can't play nice with others it doesn't get to exist at all. Proton+Steam means there is never a reason to run windows at all. "But I need some non-game windows applications." K. Proton is able to reliably run games in a library of tens of thousands of games with all kinds of bad programming and obscure hardware use. It's a standard for being able to run windows apps in linux that is going to cover any other application you have.
Some people are sadly addicted to games with invasive anticheats
There's definitely software that uses parts of the windows API that games don't touch. And doesn't work properly on Wine. I keep a windows install around just for using an analysis software for some lab equipment that refuses to start in wine.
Things like CAD software are also a struggle, though the latest wine seems to have resolved a number of graphics issues with getting PTC Creo to properly use the nvapi and nvidia graphics drivers through wine.
While wine is amazing, plenty of things don't work with it. Usually you don't need them, but if you do, you do
If a game doesn't work on proton it's not worth playing for me.
What if I want to play Destiny 2?
Get one of those windows handhelds and pretend it's a desktop
THEN YOU ARE WRONG! /jk
Even if it worked, I wouldn't want Adobe clogging up my Linux system with all their BS just to run Photoshop.
That shit gets a dedicated system on a dedicated drive.
I have really been struggling to get proton to work in OpenSUSE, despite ProtonDB having only positive experience with the games I've attenpted. Running Tumbleweed X11 KDE with an 30 series Nvidia GPU. And in trying to fix them I seem to have broken my display drivers altogether. Plenty of system restarts, but all this happened without going into windows for a month. And that's why I dual boot 😢
I haven't run tumbleweed in a while, but I did have a similar issue on arch with X11 kde.
In the Nvidia settings, ensure that both Force Composition Pipeline and Force Full Composition Pipeline are disabled (unchecked) otherwise some games launched from steam using proton 8 or newer freezes on focus.
Obviously you'd have to fix your display drivers first. Maybe a reinstall is the quickest solution there.
Yeah, trying a Snapper restore since I'm out of things I know to look at, but that appears to be the next step. Thanks for the info on the Nvidia settings, is that in some config file?
You could save it to a config file and then load that before starting X
Windows managed to brick itself when I booted for the first time in a month. I only wanted it for the Karafun app, but I guess I can live without it.
Just use rEFInd to easily overcome bootloader coups
I haven't used my Windows drive in almost a year now, Thinking about throwing another distro on there right now.
I went out and bought a very cheap external SSD. Windows is not touching my physical hardware on the bare metal.
its possible to use windows on a external drive?
Wibtousb is the software I used to clone my.drive to external SSD.
Sadly its paid unless you know how to sail the seven seas
Never trusted this setup to begin with because I didn't trust Microsoft and I'm not all that capable or want to take time to sort this stuff out on a regular basis.
So I just setup my ThinkPad laptop with two removable SSDs and I just swap one or the other whenever I need. The drive is easily switched, from power down, remove drive, insert other drive and restart only takes about two minutes.
I'm not going to risk messing up my setup because two operating systems can't work with one another.
Besides I seldom switch, I use Windows if I really have to about three or four times a year.
Wine won’t work?
I really wish Excel would work on wine. It's the only reason I do occasionally fire up windows on my duel boot. (And no the open source / browser based spreadsheet options don't always suffice, brilliant as they are).
I recently had this issue needing to run Excel macros. I ended up using Oracle Virtualbox to run Windows from inside linux. Even more linuxey is using Proxmox to run your Windows VMs but that's a bit more of a faff.
Don't use virtualbox, instead use virt-manager (KVM). KVM is faster and doesn't do awful stuff to their users.
Oh shit, that's awesome, thanks for the heads up!
For me its the opposite, Linux always boots fine but occasionally a linux system update will break the Windows boot option in systemd-boot
At least 2 SSD is a 100% safe protection.
If only ...
That's what I use? Am I in the clear?
That's what I'm doing too, running fine but when I reinstall windows for whatever reason (mainly for it being slow and buggy) I disconnect linux drive because one time it broke my grub by messing with efi partition (nothing unrepairable but annoying at least)
This is why I don't dual-boot.
Only reason I keep a Windows install on an SSD for my laptop: my schools remote test proctoring service only works with Windows and Mac. I normally run pop_os on it but switch to the windows when I have to take a test.
i need to remove my windows boot drive from my workstation, but it lives in a rack. And has a temperament. Sometimes when losing power shit just refuses to boot for like an hour, eventually it randomly boots. Still unsure why. Could be anything really. Best guess is bad cmos battery though. Could be slightly bunged bios, could be marginally fucky cpu. Who knows. It's fine when shutdown with power for long periods of time though.
Gotta love modern hardware, if only 7 segment displays weren't a 300 dollar privilege.
I have an old, spinning rust WinBlows, easily inserted in the ex-cdrom slot of my bathtub movie lenovo t440p, because once a year or so I need to upgrade the firmware of some crap that has no other option. Wastes about 24 hrs of (annoying but small) power updating each time. May this pass, in time. (like tears in rain :)
I should get around to imaging it onto a SSD, but I don't, due to distaste, and then I need it again. :(.
just leave a grub floppy in the machine and boot from there, you won't even notice.
This hit me hard. I remember doing something like this 😅
Me too. I remember putting a PXE loader on a floppy... and it being the best idea in that mess of a plan that I've had...
I have three ssd and none of them boot windows. I do have a windows vm (and macos too) in virt-manager in case I need it, but I haven't boot them for about a year.
Both my drives are the same Linux distro, I have Windows and MacOS in a VM when I need them, and Windows To Go for rare cases where I actually need to boot win11.
isn't WTG dead?
Rufus allows you to create a bootable Windows 11 To Go drive
pretty sure it's not the actual windows to go
It's not the 'actual' Windows To Go, because Windows 11 doesn't officially support WTG. But it functions exactly like WTG.
@JackGreenEarth @vox most useful windows utility in years
Don't use windows
Unfortunately, Linux can't run everything *yet. What do you propose people do instead when they can't access the apps they need to play with friends or work?
VM, I run Virtualbox in full screen on a second monitor for my work stuff. Works great.
Vms work fine for WINDOWS ONLY apps, along with with
Embrace freedom, change the habits, eat the rich!! /s
I just put Windows in a VM, if I bother at all.
I just put Windows in a quarantine, if I bother at all.
I gotta give dual booting a shot. I need windows for my college's crappy exam software, but I also can't afford another laptop just for Linux
I just use a VM for windows apps that don't work through wine
I haven't had to use any exam software recently, but in the past when I did I remember reading that it can detect when the host is virtual and will not run in a VM. Fortunately at the time I still had a windows laptop lying around, but I'd have a real problem if one of a courses now tried to do this.
It’s worth it lol, though watch out you may find yourself dreading opening windows
I have to use Windows for work, so this is how I got it setup and MS still makes it difficult with updates lol.
I have two ssds for raid1 boot,it's very nice
just wish my bios would stop making phantom uefi boot entries every boot
Dual boot issues like this is why I stopped using windows not in a VM.
i have two other possibilities at hand, that do not involve two SSDs:
And if your company wants you to use rotten software, they also want you to give them the delays, downtimes and annoyances that naturally come with rotten decisions, just keep that in mind.
Here is one thing to remember and why i call it rotten software and rotten decisions:
Microsoft offers a free "blame the ransomware people" to any CTO who just wants to receive money without working at all or not having to "think" during work. That same CTO can get a bonus after "solving" the ransomware issue and then: "look how 'invaluable' that CTO is to the company" he "worked" for month ( yelling at engineers he previously told to install rotten software???) and resolved the ransomware issue!! This is same to those who work. no law has ever given people that many payed breaks from work as "rotten software" vendors did. and if you made a mistake and did not get trained before, you could blame bot beeing trained.
Look at it from a "fingerpointer" point of view, one cloud always blame someone else for everything and the only one to blame is too big to fail and also untouchable due to their army of darkness lawyers. thus anything happened? no one could be guilty AND be held responsible. Also if one is slow at work, and so is his OS, obviously easy to blame someone else again.
so microsoft offers a "solution" to "boss wants you to work more and quicker" but remember, that same boss only "needs" a cover for his own ass to be able to point to someone else and the ones creating the rotten software do deliver that ;-)
i do not know any better wording for such a situation than "rotten" thus i name it so.
Secure boot Linux bootloader Kernel update
Every panel would be the same for you regardless of the brand of your laptop, no?
MacOS updates* have never broke my Asahi
*May have to do with the fact I haven't booted into MacOS since installing Asahi
They actually did for some people a couple of months ago.
I assume since we're talking about Linux bootloader you aren't running macos, but Linux.
Bad post, contains anime
I think you mean good post. Linux + Anime + Programming = GG.