Your Windows 10 PC will soon be ‘junk’ - users told to resist Microsoft deadline::If you’re still using Windows 10 and don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11 any time soon you might want to sign a new online petition
Your Windows 10 PC will soon be ‘junk’ - users told to resist Microsoft deadline::If you’re still using Windows 10 and don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11 any time soon you might want to sign a new online petition
I can highly recommend either using windows as a VM in virtualbox, or simply dual boot. I’m using Linux 99% of the time, but I still boot into windows occasionally for some firmware updates or software that does not work with Linux.
Have looked at dual boot before but it seemed like a ( admittedly fairly minor) pita. File sharing/ access across both systems is my main concern. Thanks for your response.
File access across systems is no problem.
It just has to be a separate partition either in the form of a whole SSD/HDD or as a partition on your main drive. Just make it NTFS (a file system that all those OSes know) it works with both windows and linux. I still have 3 NTFS partitions from my dual-boot days.
Yeah, just make a drive/partition NTFS, and it will be usable by both systems. Please note that some Linux software doesn’t work well with NTFS, for example Timeshift (backup utility) and Steam Proton, so it’s best to have an ext4/btrfs drive for things you do exclusively on Linux and NTFS for common files of both systems (like documents, music, films, whatever)
Like others have said, file sharing works pretty well with NTFS. I’ve had some issues playing games on steam that are on NTFS drives, but most work well. Also some issues accessing files from Cura for some reason. Other than that I have had no issues sharing files between w11 and Linux.
If you can, I recommend getting a dedicated SSD to install Linux on, and I’d recommend getting PopOS or Linux Mint as your distro. Both are Debian/Ubuntu derivatives, but are even easier and just overall better distros than Ubuntu imo, and most hardware and software will be compatible ootb without any tinkering.
FWIW, I only needed to install one package to be able to read the drive that my Windows install is located on/a shared drive between my two installs. It has been very easy to access the Windows partition from my linux install, but I have not needed to access my linux partition from the Windows install yet, so can’t speak to the ease of doing this.
I usually use USB sticks for sharing files between VM and host.
I personally had much better experience with QEMU than Virtualbox (although all my VMs are Linux, so might be specifics here).