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!
I tried this with Mint and broke my Windows partition somehow.
That’s a bummer, sorry man. That is super rare though, I’ve never heard of that happening to anyone else in my 10+ years of Linux life. Don’t let it keep you from trying it again. I guess that is a testimony to the importance of backups, especially when working with partitions.
OP, the most trouble I’ve ever heard of or experienced myself was some GRUB issues, which are just a matter of the bootloader recognizing that there is a windows or Linux partition alongside whatever is being booted up. There are a ton of tutorials on how to address that type of issue though, it’s usually a matter of one or two commands in a terminal or command prompt.
Same here. It somehow broke my BIOS and I couldn’t even force it to boot off my windows install flash drive!