How many of you still dual-boot Windows?

The actual BIOS update. After the install I find a folder /efi/EFI/Insyde and I’m not sure how it will work with Ventoy / Hiren and the like.

perhaps start a new thread about the issue your having. Give us as much detail as possible. It is normal for the bios to reboot the machine during updates however it usually has already copied everything it needs to continue the process in most cases

I used to be the admin over at driverpacks.net (still am technically, but the project is dead). I wrote a powershell script to automate the driver install process for Win11 (post-install) and published it here: http://forum.driverpacks.net/viewtopic.php?pid=59275#p59275

Have a look, might help you in your deployments. :wink:

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Never ever …

When I decided to start using Linux, I immediately replaced Windows with Ubuntu. A real leap into the unknown… and I never touched Windows again.

Booting multiple Linux distros and Win11 on a removable drive. Only use Win11 for some audio ripping, converting, etc. a few times a year.

Haven’t found anything to replace EAC, mp3tag, Leawo BR player and foobar. None of these apps work well, or at all in Wine for me.

I still dual boot on my desktop (Debian 14 & Windows 11 Pro) for gaming, but not on any of my laptops (currently 11).

14? Are you coming from the future?

:wink:

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I switched to testing so that I could get plasma 6…I wish Debian would back port the DE’s to stable to be able to use stable for the entirety of its lifetime, but once they’re a few major patch versions behind I have to abandon stable to keep up with modern.

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I am lucky in the fact I didn’t rely on any W!ndows only apps so one day I just erased my drive and started my Linux journey. It felt so satisfying and I’ve never looked back.

I get it. WinAMP + Milkdrop represented an era.

May I draw your attention to projectM:

projectM is an open-source project that reimplements the esteemed Winamp Milkdrop by Geiss in a more modern, cross-platform reusable library.

I use it in VLC.

yay -Syu projectm

So, a little retrospective! (a bit about macOS also, sorry)

I’m not dual booting anymore, after years of a partition chaos multibooting macOS (never windows) + various distro hoping. EndeavourOS is my haven, with a clean ESP + Root partition.

I’ve found myself in very rare need of a Windows system for flashing tools:

  1. to update the firmware of an external nvme-USB enclosure,
  2. to unlock the bootloader of Xiaomi devices (there is just an outdated Linux port).

Until recently, it was easy to quickly do it on one of the many devices in my surrounding (relatives, friends, …), but now that I have converted most of them to Linux… it’s harder to find. So I now experiment with running Windows in a VM, but I haven’t been successful so far. It should eventually work with USB pass-through and correct drivers installed though.

For my relatives:

  1. updating the BIOS: Hiren didn’t work as expected on Ventoy when I tried it, so I ended up using a Windows 10 ISO itself, with a trick to skip installation and get into a terminal.
  2. dual booting for their “peace of mind” in the transition, but not before sabotaging Windows’ update process. I know how it feels to have broken bootloader as a noob… After a year of two, it usually gets forgotten, cleaned/shrunk to <40GiB or deleted to regain space.

Relatives / friends that are left to be converted:

  1. People on old macbooks that could switch: they prefer to wait to have a compellingly deprecated environment before switching. Very robust devices! I help them to last, with OpenCore Legacy Patcher.
  2. People on new macbooks (colleagues, academics): some of them make me laugh, they share neovim configs, are at ease with homebrew and know more or less coding, but shy away Linux. Giving away their slide show engines (keynote, sometimes powerpoint) is a major worry for them. Some have also very specific software requirements, and nothing can be done about it.
  3. Non-tech people on Windows with professional use: a student relying on word+powerpoint for university and paper writing –> pressured environment, a graphic designer heavily into the Adobe ecosystem with big Nvidia card and gamer –> the jump and compromises are too big without a strong inner motivation.

Is summary, what is needed to percolate:

  1. flashing tools
  2. polished office suite
  3. do something about Adobe
  4. finish conversion of gamers (kill anti-cheat excluding Linux)

The last two points are the hardest, because they rely on graphic resource, so no VM possible.

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While I have Linux on a Dell xps I don t dual boot. I still have stock windows on my Aurora I purchased a few months ago. I will eventually run Linux on it, but it came with a year of premium support, so I need to wait a bit just in case…

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Haven’t dual booted since the early 2000’s, but the one thing that really felt good was letting my personal Microsoft account expire. The absolute shovelware of ads and “value-added slop AI”, coupled with the egregious price increases meant that it was essentially a done deal to dump them once and for all on the software front. The straw that broke the camels back was oddly Microsoft’s OneDrive photos section forcing “memories” of photos in your vault, without considering that they might not be what someone wants to see, - emotionally painful photos of people no longer here. With no choice other than you have to have those images presented to you, front and centre at the top of the page. Their response was utterly tone deaf ; “well you can disable it temporarily but we’ll find some new ones for you”

There isn’t a single Microsoft-facing app or service or device running at home, and that’s absolutely a win. Microsoft’s primary focus now is delivering value to their shareholders. Consumers aren’t even a rounding number on their figures, or even remotely a focus. So here’s your value-driven shareholder equity, Microsoft : **raises a solitary middle-finger** I cannot even come close to expressing how much I loathe what you’ve become.

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I still have Win 10 as a dual boot and have free protection on it for another year so happy to keep it on as I occasionally need it. It was the last decent OS that Microsoft produced as I’ve always found it highly reliable, unlike certain Linux distros I could mention.

Win 10 has never caused me a Grub problem, but I won’t bother with Win 11 and beyond, having read that a lot of their users don’t like it or are having a bunch of issues with it. Also I don’t like the direction MS is going.

I have a “current” version of Win11 on a separate drive (I don’t want it to interfere with the rest of my system) to:

  1. Keep abreast of where Win 11 is going so I can advise my customers.
  2. Flash the couple of devices that require Win to do this.

Other than that…I avoid Win in ANY version as much as physically possible…..

I’m still using Grub…I’ve used it for over 20 years now & don’t have problems configuring it to do what I want/need….. My boot list is rather long…… 2 installs of Endeavour (one a week behind the other…just in case)….A install of Linux Mint because I install Mint for all of my new Linux users & I want to stay up on any Mint problems…A couple of “interesting” installs to play with & just have fun…..And Win 11 for work & special uses.

And I do all of it on real hardware…I don’t think a VM can give you the same experience as real metal.

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It’s like WHAT? WHY?

Since retiring …. what is Windoze?

Don’t need it. Don’t want it. Don’t use it.

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I dualboot, and boot up Windoze like once every three months when I:

  • want to play Portal with RTX, because Lossless Scaling (but there is Linux version, so I will probably switch soon)

  • need mtkclient for something, it doesn’t work on Linux for me

this the same thing?
https://github.com/bkerler/mtkclient
seems to be installable through this
sudo pacman -S python python-pip python-pipenv git libusb fuse2

yeah
on Linux (and I tried a few devices) it just can’t use the exploit (I think it uses the exploit requiring kernel rebuild on my device, and I don’t want to do it)

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