Hi. I’ve been thinking about trying out Linux for a while now (haven’t used it before). I have 1 PC which I share with my son. I mainly use it to browse the web, listen to music, watch movies and TV shows, Office for work, etc. things like that. Those things have good substitutes from what I’ve read, so not an issue. But my son plays video games like The Sims, Cities Skylines, Stardew Valley, Roblox, Minecraft, Stellaris, Slime Rancher… and from what I’ve seen it’s kind of difficult to game comfortably (stable) on Linux. As for the distro I was considering Ubuntu. Currently on Windows 10 Home. Looking forward to what you guys have to say. All advice welcome. Thanks.
In the last few years, Valve (company behind the popular Steam PC games store) has made huuuge efforts in making most games work well on Linux, because the Steam Deck console that they sell runs on Linux, and the compatibility layer they made is called Proton.
To check what games work well on Linux you should look in the ProtonDB.
If there are games that only work on Windows, you could do dual booting.
Is dual booting as simple as loading the Windows OS off of a drive in the BIOS?
Yes.
But every other year Windows seems to “accidentally” mess with Linux bootloaders on other drives/partitions.
Awesome, thanks for the info and heads up
I dual boot Linux Mint, installed it AFTER Windows and never had any problems. I default boot Linux.
Pretty much, yeah.
I’d recommend using two physical drives (SSD/HDD) instead of two partitions if you can, because windows update sometimes messes with the bootloader. But most laptops only have one drive so that’s not always possible.
Do keep in mind that formatting a drive (e.g. to split it in partitions) will erase all the data, so make sure you have backups!
Usually the bootloader is only on one drive regardless. Keeping them on separate physical drives can be nice for simplicity but there’s no reason you can’t put them on the same drive.