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!
Dualbooting is possible and easy: just gotta shrink the Windows partition and install Linux next to it. Make sure to not format the whole thing by mistake, though. A lot of Linux installers want to format the disk by default, so you have to pick manual mode and make sure to shrink (not delete and re-create!) the windows partition.
As for its usefulness, however… Switching the OS is incredibly annoying. Every time you want to do that you have to shut down the system completely and boot it back up. That means you have to stop everything you’re doing, save all the progress, and then try to get back to speed 2 minutes later. After a while the constant rebooting gets really old.
Furthermore, Linux a completely different system that shares only some surface level things with Windows. Switching to it basically means re-learning how to use a computer almost from scratch, which is, also, incredibly frustrating.
The two things combined very quickly turn into a temptation to just keep using the more familiar system. (Been there, done that.)
I think I’ll have to agree with people who propose Virtual Machines as a solution.
Running Linux in a VM on Windows would let you play around with it, tinker a little and see what software is and isn’t available on it. From there you’ll be able to decide if you’re even willing to dedicate more time and effort to learning it.
If you decide to continue, you can dual boot Windows and Linux. But not to be able to switch between the two, but to be able to back out of the experiment.
Instead, the roles of the OSes could be reversed: a second copy of Windows could be install in a VM, which, in turn, would run on Linux.
That way, you’d still have a way to run some more picky Windows software (that is, software that refuses to work in Wine) without actually booting into Windows.
This approach would maximize exposure to Linux, while still allowing to back out of the experiment at any moment.