Then anyone running a Windows VM would just switch to a Server edition, which is almost exclusively run via a VM.

If you install each OS with it’s own drive as the boot device, then you won’t see this issue.

Unless you boot Windows via the grub boot menu. If you do that then Windows will see that drive as the boot device.

If you select the OS by using the BIOS boot selection then you won’t see this issue.

I was bitten by Windows doing exactly this almost 15 years ago. Since that day if I ever had a need for dual-boot (even if running different distros) each OS will get it’s own dedicated drive, and I select what I want to boot through the BBS (BIOS Boot Selection). It’s usually invoked with F10 or F11 (but could be a different key combo.

While I generally agree with that, that’s not what seems to be happening here. What seems to be happening is that anyone who boots Windows via grub is getting grub itself overwritten.

When you install Linux, boot loaders like grub generally are smart and try to be helpful by scanning all available OSes and provide a boot menu entry for those. This is generally to help new users who install a dual-boot system and help them not think that “Linux erased Windows” when they see the new grub boot loader.

When you boot Windows from grub, Windows treats the drive with grub (where it booted from) as the boot drive. But if you tell your BIOS to boot the Windows drive, then grub won’t be invoked and Windows will boot seeing it’s own drive as the boot drive.

This is mostly an assumption as this hasn’t happened to me and details are still a bit scarce.

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That would break 90+% of installations then. And all of Azure.

even if you have two drives, you still have only one bootloader, not?

The idea is to have completely separate boot and OS drives. You select which one you want to boot through the BIOS boot selection (ie. pressing F10 or F11 at the BIOS screen).

This functionally makes each OS “unaware” of the other one.

I don’t like btrfs, cause you still sometimes read about people loosing their data.

That was only on RAID setups. So if you have only a singular disk, as opposed to an array, you’re fine. And that issue has been fixed for a while now anyways.

I’ve been running btrfs on my laptop’s root partition for well over a year now and it’s fine.

It’s not a movie. It’s prophecy.

Fun fact: the nubs on the tail club are called osteoderms and the tail spikes on a stegosaurus is called a thagomizer.

The distro part is actually kinda easy. In my mind there’s only a few distros that should ever be considered by a new user. Fedora, or Ubuntu/Mint/Pop!_OS. The last three are effectively the same thing under the hood and all of them will do the job.

The real hard question is which desktop environment. Plasma is generally my go to suggestion. I feel it follows a tried and true paradigm for UI and UX. It’s incredibly polished, fast, and very full featured. The one that really sticks out as odd to me is gnome and is the one that I would never recommend. I wouldn’t discourage, just not recommend.

You forgot that you also need to create a new 32bit word entry with the value of the amount of system RAM in gigabytes times 2 divided by the square root of your age times 10.

Otherwise BSODWord won’t be picked up.

Edit: also you need to redo that every time your system updates because Windows update will reset all those values

However, now and I run across a windows issue. It’s a nightmare. I can put hours of work into trying to fix a driver issue or an issue with updates and get nowhere. Then go to reinstall the operating system and have to spend more hours just to get it installed.

Now in Linux, not only do I rarely have issues but also fixing those issues are pretty straightforward. And if I can’t fix it a reinstall takes minutes and I’m back up and running in no time.

THANK YOU. I’m sick of this rhetoric about Linux being hard and user-unfriendly because of the command-line.

Windows is such a pain to use for a while now. You need a ton of post install scripts and hacks to make it even remotely usable and when something goes wrong good luck figuring out what. The event viewer is usually just a bunch of vague COM errors with an ID. Then when you look up that ID it’s barely more useful than “something went wrong”.

But you can do nearly everything with the GUI in Linux for a while now. The level of stuff you would need to use the terminal for is the same level on Windows you would need the command-line for, or (SHUDDER) the registry.

In fact, I would argue that doing things in Linux via the GUI is easier than even on Windows. I’m speaking as a user of KDE Plasma. I personally dislike Gnome.

Needing to use command line for some things that should be a right click, not supporting right click

You can do nearly everything you need to via the GUI on the major distros (the ones that most people would use). There’s plenty of things on Windows you must use the command-line for.

And anytime you need to use the Run dialogue it’s the same argument. It’s the same “issue” of having to type instead of using your mouse.

And if you don’t need to use the command-line on Windows, it’s the registry. The awful, terrible, horrible, disgusting registry.

I’m not actually sure what on earth you mean with “not supporting right click”. Maybe you’re thinking of older Mac versions?

it’s just not a great general purpose desktop for the average user,

It has been for a while now.

My /home partition is the same one I setup almost 12 years ago. It’s been through multiple versions of Ubuntu, multiple Ubuntu reinstalls, a switch over to EndeavourOS, a reinstall of EndeavourOS, cloned to multiple drives as each one failed or was upgraded to a larger sized drive. But it’s the same exact /home data.

Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t run anything other than shitty FOSS games or the occasional Platinum AppDB rated game like World of Warcraft on Linux, and even for the latter the install instructions were convoluted.

Hey! I was playing LOTRO just fine on Linux back then. It actually worked better on Linux than Windows back then too.

Before there were scripted alternatives large scale Windows deployments were all imaged because of the hours it took to set up a single machine swapping floppies and writing to spinning rust.

With Windows 7 I was making golden images to simplify deployments.

Even now for the one Windows 10 VM I need for a very specific thing, I couldn’t use it without installing AtlasOS (an extensive powershell script to cut out as much of the bloat as possible). Otherwise the system would consistently slow down and stop responding. It was basically unusable (it’s running on Proxmox on a considerably old server).

Recently I decided I no longer wanted LUKS encryption on my laptop because I don’t travel anymore. So I followed the steps to do an in-place drive decryption. It worked, but I had missed a step to update the bootloader. So I fired up a live distro, chrooted to the installed system and 2 minutes later I had a working system.