I have a real simple solution that involves not windows
i use a different drive for my windows installation because that happened to often,
and i swear it once managed to whipe the bootloader on the linux drive.i have no idea how it did that,
but i avoided starting windows using the grub entry since then.Having two drives is sometimes not enough, either. I have no idea why, but anytime Windows installs for the first time or goes through a major update (not the small security patches, but the periodic feature releases) there’s a random D20 dice throw to determine if it will randomly decide to create the bootloader and recovery partitions in another drive, even though your main installation isn’t there.
I kid you not, Windows 10 once decided that my external SSD enclosure was the best place to put the bootloader.
This happened to me! Did an update, unplugged my eSATA and BAM! Can’t find bootloader. I literally, physically facepalmed when I realized what happened. At least the old one still worked from the primary.
I’ve done a ton of Linux updates and this has never happened to me once (yet).
I swear at this point Windows users are collectively victims of Stockholm syndrome.
Hot take, windows isn’t that bad (privacy issues aside).
I always say, an OS is a tool, not a religion. I use Linux at home 98% of the time because it fits what I need to do and it’s snappier than Windows on my hardware and gives me more control, or maybe I know better how to do certain things in Linux nowadays that I’ve left Windows mostly behind. I use Windows at work because that’s what dictated, and also because MS Visio is only on Windows (I could use MacOS with Omnigraffle, but Macs are not available at my pay grade. Whatever). They pay me to work and be productive, and this means using Outlook/Teams, AD SSO integration with Edge, all the VPNs/network control/DLP agents. And luckily now I can use Linux subsystem in Windows, so I can work on the cli when I need to do something fancy. They don’t pay me to spend hours trying to find a way to work with their systems other than what’s supported.
On the topic at hand (bootloader issues). Never had a problem personally, but Iast time I did proper dual booting (on the same drive) was with Windows8.1. Now I have different drives, with the bios configured to boot from the drive with Linux. If I want to boot on Windows 10 I actually have to change the boot sequence. And even then there is grub (from an old dual boot setup).
It’s always funny to me when people defend something by saying that it’s “not that bad”, because that still acknowledges that it is bad.
I mean I can take up issues with Linux as well. The driver support can be iffy at times, especially with Nvidia, gaming can be a challenge, depending on what game you’re playing.
“Not that bad” is a phrase, which acknowledges issues but still contests something to be bad beyond acceptance.
Oh please, half the time on most computers after installing stock Windows you’ll need to install the NIC drivers from a USB stick because you can’t download drivers locally without a NIC. With Linux, it pretty works out the gate. Significant driver issues haven’t been a real issue with Linux in about a decade.
Nvidia drivers are especially weird to use as an example. Since the advent of AI, Nvidia Linux support has vastly improved since most AI use cases require Linux. It’s enterprise-ready at this point.
As for the games that don’t work well - the binaries were only built for Windows, so Linux has to jump through hoops to run them. That’s not Linux’s fault, it’s the fault of the game developers. Thanks to the FOSS community those hoops are only getting easier to jump through. Most of the games that don’t work at all depend on some sort of horrific anti-cheat rootkit that any tech literate person should consider a dealbreaker even if they use Windows as a daily driver.
And the games that do work, which is most of the games on Steam at this point, perform better on Linux than Windows on the same hardware because they don’t have to deal with the bloat of a Windows OS.
I guess if you can accept ads crammed into every nook and cranny of the OS, constantly fighting with Edge over your choice of browser, reduced battery life and system performace due to OS bloat, having every single aspect of your computing experience built around corporate profits rather than user experience, and buying a computer every few years because of planned obsolescence you could settle with a bad OS like Windows.
It actually is worse than “that bad”. Windows 2000 wasn’t “that bad” - everything after that has gone downhill.
Objective reasons why Windows is extremely shitty:
- with every new Windows version, the same settings are shuffled around and users have to re-learn the interfaces to find stuff they had been able to easily find before
- bloatware
- tons of software is shoved down your throat with opt-out options either not available, or you have to jump through literal hoops to get there
Yes, someone please come free us! I am being held hostage by Windows and Autodesk Inventor.
It’s the usual problem: if your employer IT refuses to budge, you get locked into a Windows (or Apple) ecosystem. I had the same. My solution was to remove myself from corporate IT, and use my own device.
I use workarounds for the interfaces with corporate:
- MS Teams Linux client (sadly discontinued as of 2022) still works out of a jail, but the browser solution is also tested and ready as backup should I be forced
- Webmail instead of a proper mail proram - that’s a big trade-off, but I can work with it, as much as it sucks
- Webex for conferencing (as it works properly with Firefox, contrary to many other solutions)
- Web portals continue to work - even though sometimes I need a user agent switcher to pretend I am using chrome (fuck you @MS Teams)
There’s mail apps for Linux. I think thunderbird is most popular.
My point was about corporate IT refusing to provide a mail server to the outside world.
So no IMAP/POP3 server or what do you mean? If so how does the web app work?
Webapp probably uses Exchange services internally and exposes only a web interface to the internet
Ah, I suppose that makes sense.
I take it webmail is due to Exchange-based mail?
The €10 I pay a year for Exquilla is worth its weight in gold. It’s about the only thing on my system that’s not FOSS, but I’m not even mad because it works. 9.5/10 would recommend.
Or Nvidia GPU owners because Nvidia is fine on Windows but sucks on Linux.
I’m using kde5 on X. To my knowledge, the only issues you might have with Nvidia on Linux is if you want to use Wayland instead of X. Unless you are someone who refuses to use non-free drivers for philosophical reasons, but then you wouldn’t be using Windows.
I’ve been running an Nvidia GPU for over 6 years now on Linux without issues.
I even am using a fairly recent 4070ti and was able to use it with proprietary drivers soon after launch and was running cyberpunk 2077 at 4k with high settings and ray tracing with an average 60fps with dsr.
I also use the cuda cores for running open source llms locally and have no issues there either.
using XWayland loads games fine for me in Wayland :)
the only issues you might have with Nvidia on Linux is if you want to use Wayland instead of X
So present-day technology instead of legacy crap.
Ummm…you think windows isn’t legacy?
On windows they make you install their annoying software to do driver updates and it sends random notifications and has a bunch of ads and other things I don’t want when installing software.
Finally another beeing experiencing this issue…i wiped windows after this incident and never looked back
I think their logic behind this complete bullshit is if they make it hard enough on you to dual boot, you’ll just stick with windows. I switched over a year ago, never looking back and seeing posts like this one makes me feel even better about it.
With UEFI it’s waaayyyy less bad than it used to be. There is no more MBR in the traditional sense for windows to clobber. Windows and Linux can share an UEFI boot partition both dropping in their appropriate boot binaries.
Even if you install Linux and Windows on separate devices, unless you do something strange they will share the same UEFI boot partition.
By something strange, I assume you mean installing Windows on a disk with the other disks disconnected so Windows will create its EFI partition on that disk (since it’s dumb and will create EFI partition on the first disk it finds, even if it’s an HDD). Though UEFI doesn’t mind, will still list all the bootloaders from different disks without any problems. You can even unplug and plug them as you wish, it still won’t be corrupted this way.
Man, when I first messed around with Linux I hosed the MBR more times than I can remember. Either through Windows smashing it with an update, or my dumb ass doing stupid shit in gparted.
Pretty sure I was able to recover the important files somehow, but my parents banished me to the old family desktop for that pretty quick.
Me too. Lol. It was almost a right of passage for people at the time.
Personally, I do 2 separate UEFI boot partitions. Grub is the default which can select the windows boot partition. Then Windows can do whatever it wants to it’s own boot partition.
Just use rEFInd to easily overcome bootloader coups
Hear me out: Class action lawsuit
Heard you and that wouldn’t fly. Just like you’re not supposed to run Windows on mission critical systems like nuclear reactors (seriously, check the EULA), running multiple operating systems side by side is most likely out of a supported configuration and “use at your own risk”. You’d have zero standing or less for any sort of lawsuit.
But just because it is in the EULA doesn’t make it legal. At a time where big tech is being kept under a microscope for antitrust regulation, I’d say that an OS that actively destroys other competing OSes on the machine it is installed on should be considered an unfair anti-competitor tactic.
Idk why you think they have to support this. It’d be one thing if it was malicious but I really doubt it is.
It’s malicious.
Might not hold up legally, but it’s still insane that the single largest vendor of operating systems cant figure out how to install a bootloader with playing russian roulette.
- install windows
- adjust main partition so you have space for Linux
- install linux, during install create anither efi partition, and root partition.
- linux probes foreign OS (some distros might not) and creates a chainloader entry from your new EFI to Windows EFI
- set BIOS to boot from linux EFI
Windows never knows the other partition exists and leaves it intact.
Could you give me more detail for step 3?
Don’t even have to do that. Install windows first, then install Linux with refind bootloader on preferably a separate disk. Done
I installed arch so that didn’t happen.
Did exactly that.
You do need a separate EFI, even though linux finds EFI, otherwise windows update trashes it randomly and why the meme we see here exists, with separate EFI windows doesn’t know about it. You can shutdown windows mid update and boot linux, then reboot back to windows and update will continue. Siloed System
That’s literally what I did yesterday with my method. It works, Windows has never trashed it
It will, thats why that meme exists.
Not during typically reboots, but when some windows update or autofile repair happens it thinks it is the only OS on that partition and does what it likes.
Nope, ran it like this for over 5 years. Definitely rebooted during updates / did some crap
Then you have been lucky, because most peoples experience with grub EFI on Windows partition is windows will eventually scrub it.
Yes. When you install Linux it will auto detect the Windows EFI partition and put boot stuff there by default, but then windows comes along and will randomly trash that setup. So during install don’t go with the suggested option, instead use the partitioning tool to creat another small EFI boot partition elswhere on disk, leaving Windows EFI and OS paetitions as is. Also create your root and home partition(s). Install to those partitions, then Linux should prompt for Probe Foreign OS and add a chainloader entry to your grub menu. This entry, when selected, points grub to windows EFI partition ID and hands off the boot process to Windows. Windows is unaware it has been chainloaded. As long as you set BIOS to load directly from the LINUX EFI entry then you will boot to Grub with Linux/Windows Dual option…But technically it is not a true Dual Boot, it is a sequential boot I guess. I have had this for 7 years on same install and boot between W10 and Linux daily. Windows has never touched my Linux EFI.
How to add chainloader entry to grub?
I’m using EFISTUB instead of a boot loader (on the PC running Arch, anyway) and Windows hasn’t figured out how to break that, yet.
Somehow it hasn’t figured out how to ruin my systemd-boot bootloader on EFI, (NixOS, this time) either. Perhaps it just has better support for EFI than BIOS?
i have two other possibilities at hand, that do not involve two SSDs:
- don’t use intentionally broken software in the first place ;-)
- use another device for bootloader, could be a readonly CD or a usb drive, PXE/bootp could also do it.
And if your company wants you to use rotten software, they also want you to give them the delays, downtimes and annoyances that naturally come with rotten decisions, just keep that in mind.
Here is one thing to remember and why i call it rotten software and rotten decisions:
Microsoft offers a free “blame the ransomware people” to any CTO who just wants to receive money without working at all or not having to “think” during work. That same CTO can get a bonus after “solving” the ransomware issue and then: “look how ‘invaluable’ that CTO is to the company” he “worked” for month ( yelling at engineers he previously told to install rotten software???) and resolved the ransomware issue!! This is same to those who work. no law has ever given people that many payed breaks from work as “rotten software” vendors did. and if you made a mistake and did not get trained before, you could blame bot beeing trained.
Look at it from a “fingerpointer” point of view, one cloud always blame someone else for everything and the only one to blame is too big to fail and also untouchable due to their army of darkness lawyers. thus anything happened? no one could be guilty AND be held responsible. Also if one is slow at work, and so is his OS, obviously easy to blame someone else again.
so microsoft offers a “solution” to “boss wants you to work more and quicker” but remember, that same boss only “needs” a cover for his own ass to be able to point to someone else and the ones creating the rotten software do deliver that ;-)
i do not know any better wording for such a situation than “rotten” thus i name it so.
Easy solution if you only have one SSD: instead of installing Windows as your second OS, install a different Linux distro.
And while you’re at it, install a third distro
Why stop there?
Remember kids, if you’re gonna dual boot, stay safe, use 2 drives, and pray you’re fast enough to mash the boot menu button when you power on.
I just use rEFInd with auto discover turned on. I installed the windows bootloader onto my Linux boot partition and haven’t had any issues with Windows overwriting my boot entries on update.
Just press and hold the button as the computer boots!
Or just set your BIOS to take you to the boot menu on startup so you don’t have to pound keys like a barbarian.
Nah, you just need to develop a custom EFI app to boot on it. This app then calls a server on your network which will answer whether to boot on Linux or Windows (or any OS installed really).
And voilà, you don’t need to manually select the OS anymore (well, you still need to say to the server what to use, but you can do it beforehand, not during the boot)
Or maybe I share a computer with my partner that absolutely does not want to see a boot menu when they turn on the computer.
Don’t use windows
Unfortunately, Linux can’t run everything *yet. What do you propose people do instead when they can’t access the apps they need to play with friends or work?
Embrace freedom, change the habits, eat the rich!! /s
VM, I run Virtualbox in full screen on a second monitor for my work stuff. Works great.
Vms work fine for WINDOWS ONLY apps, along with with
I just put Windows in a VM, if I bother at all.
just leave a grub floppy in the machine and boot from there, you won’t even notice.
This hit me hard. I remember doing something like this 😅
Me too. I remember putting a PXE loader on a floppy… and it being the best idea in that mess of a plan that I’ve had…
