What Dual-Booting Is and Why I Don’t (Usually) Recommend It
When the topic of switching from Windows to Linux comes up, the topic of dual-booting almost always swiftly follows. Dual-booting is exactly what it sounds like: having two operating systems on the same computer. Usually in this case, the two OSes will be Windows and some form of Linux, often Ubuntu or Linux Mint. It’s often considered a good way to get your feet wet with Linux, without having to fully commit, and being able to switch back to Windows should you need to. However, having done the dual-boot thing multiple times before finally taking the Linux plunge, I would personally NOT recommend dual-booting in most cases.
The benefits of dual-booting are pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t go into them in great detail. The drawbacks, however, are significant, in my experience, and possibly not as obvious at first glance.
The biggest drawback is that you’re essentially splitting your computer into two slightly-less-good computers, and unless you do all your storage in the cloud, you’re 100% going to run into the situation where something you need (a file, a program, a meme you wanted to show your friends, etc) is on one partition while you have the other one booted. Which means you then have to reboot into the other partition. Rinse and repeat at least a couple times day, over the course of weeks or months. Needless to say, this is a phenomenal pain in the ass, and this “benefit” of dual-booting becomes a huge downside.
Which leads neatly to my next point: because switching between OSes is a huge pain, you will very likely wind up just using one or the other for nearly everything. Either you fall in love with the Linux experience and never touch the Windows partition, or you end up using Windows for everything because it’s more convenient and your Linux partition languishes. So you then effectively only have one OS, and half a computer that you never touch.
What’s worse is that Windows doesn’t always play nicely with other OSes. You will have to mess around in BIOS a little in order to get Linux to boot first, if that’s what you want, and sometimes even that won’t work. BIOS is scary for newbies and you could brick your computer by changing things in it, although this admittedly isn’t likely in this scenario. But the fact remains that Windows doesn’t like to share, and if you add another OS to a Windows machine, you’re going to have to fight it at least a little in order to get it to cooperate.
The final reason I don’t recommend dual-booting is that, in my experience, it’s too easy to fall back to just using the Windows partition for everything, and never actually using the Linux system you spent all that time setting up. I spent several years with Ubuntu partitions on computers that I just never used, because all my games were in Windows, and trying to get games to cooperate in Linux was too difficult (although now, most games will just work in Linux with Proton, so this is no longer an issue). Taking the path of least resistance can be too easy, and if you have Windows to fall back on, you might not ever actually learn to use Linux.
All this having been said, there are a couple of situations where I think dual-booting Windows and Linux might be a good idea. The first is when you have a program on your list of needs that will not work in Linux no matter what, and there are no good alternatives. This is true of some business software, and also some multi-player games that have built-in anti-cheat that doesn’t work in Linux. If this is the case for you, looking into dual-booting might be a good option. The second case is if Windows is OEM installed on your device (it came pre-installed), you can’t make a backup or recovery media of it, and for whatever reason you don’t feel comfortable not having a way to get back to using Windows.
There may also be other situations I haven’t thought of, where dual-booting may be a better option for you. I don’t know your hardware or your computer usage. Only you can make this decision. All of the distros on my shortlist have guides for dual-boot systems in their wikis, if you do choose to go this route.
However, in my experience and observation, in most cases dual-booting is just a lot of headache for not a lot of benefit. Don’t do it unless you have to.
