I would like to know other people’s experiences of dual booting Endeavour and win11. I have Endeavour on my laptop’s only ssd and i’m rocking with it. But I’m gonna go to university soon and I would like to have all of my SSD’s with me(as external boot drives). Also I’ve had pretty bad experiences wiith dual booting pop-os and win11 together, thats why i’m asking. Please share your experience with me if you experienced issues with dual booting.
Note that dual booting is not the only option. You can also install Windows into a virtual machine.
If you don’t need powerful graphics on Windows side, and your machine has muscle (new-ish CPU, plenty of RAM and adequate disk size for starters), a virtual machine might be the solution.
Other than that, I’m dual booting on my quite new laptop. It has Windows pre-installed, and EndeavourOS is working very well on it too.
Dual-booting generally works fine with a couple of caveats:
- You need to be sure to disable fast-startup in Windows.
- You need to get comfortable with switching around your UEFI boot priorities as Windows will often “fix” the fact that it’s bootloader isn’t the top priority. A good work around to put in place ahead of time is to add Linux to your Windows Bootloader so that when it takes over you can easily boot into Linux and fix it.
I’ve been dual booting Linux and Windows for over three years, with Endeavour OS for half of that time.
Unlike the horror stories you hear of Windows nuking the Linux bootloader, I have had no such issues.
That could be due to the fact that I have separate EFI partitions - one for windows and another for endeavour. Seems to work just fine for me.
I configured my UEFI boot priorities to boot from USB HDD if it is possible (becuase my win11 disk is in an external usb ssd case). And it works for now. But i am really scared about the final boss of the operating systems : The Windows Update. But hey thanks for the tips.
Well I’ve experienced that horror story 2 weeks ago and I am genuinely scared about it 
. But I think it wont be a problem because I will probably use windows once a month(hopefully). And I think since its 2 seperate disks EFI partitioning should be fine.
One other thing that might help is using reFind as a boot manager.
https://discovery.endeavouros.com/grub-and-refind/how-to-install-refind/2021/03/
That way, even if Windows messes something up or Grub breaks itself, you can still boot as normal and manually select with OS you want to use. It’s been working really well for me.
my experience is rough. On the same SSD or HDD, WIN will ALWAYS find a way to sandbag the Linux distro–whether is be system clock, boot damage, and when a WIN update happens I know there will be services disabled on the Lunux side.
I honestly don’t know how people do it on the same drive.
I have had them on seperate drives for the last 2 years and I my life has been headache-free in that regard. I have a desktop, so I will unplug linux from the Mobo when WIN updates. And sometimes vice versa.
My experience is WIN/Linux together=INCOMPATIBLE
Win/Linux seperate drives=BLISS
2 cents
My experience with multibooting Win11 along Linux on the same drive has been great, since decades 
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Whether on the same or separate disks, I’ve never had Windows 10/11 destroy a Linux installation or boot entries. Worst it’s ever done - and that’s been years ago - was change the UEFI boot priority so that Windows Boot Manager was the first entry. And that was usually when I decided to add a Windows install after installing Linux.
Now, before UEFI, that’s a whole different story…
Been dual booting win11 with Linux for about 2 years now for the same reasons as you, and haven’t ran into any issues on Linux. There was one episode where I had lots of firmware updates in win11 which I didn’t see in EnOS though, but I’m not even remotely sure why that is.
The only real issue I’ve had, is Windows 11 always being set with the wrong datetime (it’s consistenty 2 hours late) so I have to sync it whenever I boot into it. Otherwise, I’ve had none of the typical horror stories of it deleting grub, changing boot order etc. It’s worth mentioning that I’ve only used it for 1 or 2 applications and spend 99% of my time in Linux
I ran into that too. One OS assumes the BIOS clock is UTC and the other that it is local time. From my docs that’s the fix I used:
- Using the search bar or Win + R shortcut, fire up the Run dialog box on Windows and type in regedit.
- With Windows Registry Editor opened, go to this location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation.
- Add a new Q-WORD (64-bit) Value entry RealTimeisUniversal and set the value to 1 (and reboot your system).
On the same drive Windows always ate the UEFI entries when it did a big update. Sooner or later you will learn all about the joys of efibootmgr. And keeping track of all the partitions is doable but very annoying too.
Personally I would always try to go with hardware that has two storage ports and use two different physical devices if possible.
Last time when it broke I didn’t even bother anymore. I fixed the Linux part and use Ventoy as a launcher if I have to boot into Windows occasionally.
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