Why do you dual-boot?

coder123 · Post by **coder123** » Tue Aug 04, 2015 8:51 pm

Hey I thought it'd be interesting to make a poll about reasons for dual-booting because my reason for dual-booting has changed over time. IMO dual-booting is one of the phases in making the transition to Linux unless you have particular reason such as running a particular game or app that won't run on Linux or there is no good Linux equivalent. (both of which should fade as reasons as time goes on IMO with equivalents for app being made and porting for games)

For me the original reason was the phase reason but now it's become a "just in case for school" reason. By the way IMO the three phases to making the Linux transition are as follows. (I realize there are exceptions to these phases being things which I mentioned before..gaming ect)
1. Running a distro in a virtual machine (to get used to the distro and app equivalents)
2. dual-booting (got used to the distro but still finding and getting used to app equivalents)
3. Single boot to Linux (found equivalents to everything)

If there're reasons in the poll the apply to you but others not given as well post what they are.

EDIT: fixed grammar error above.

z31fanatic · Post by **z31fanatic** » Tue Aug 04, 2015 11:33 pm

I chose the school/work option but I want to add that I also like Windows. In fact I like MacOS too and I triple boot my Macbook with all three

Post by **Pierre** » Tue Aug 04, 2015 11:45 pm

why do you Triple Boot OR Quad boot ?.

or even more than that?.
- coz it's got a big HDD

some of my PCs have several linux O/Ss on them, mainly for testing purposes.

when a new O/S comes out - then that ISO gets tested in a VB,
and if it is likeable, then a disk is burnt & some older O/S gets wiped on the test PCs.

But - the main reason to Dual boot - is to keep THAT OTHER O/S

all41 · Post by **all41** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 12:16 am

I chose the school/work option but I want to add that I also like Windows. In fact I like MacOS too and I triple boot my Macbook with all three

z31fanatic

I think you have finally arrived

mingle · Post by **mingle** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 12:27 am

I chose the 6th option.

There are a couple of programs that will only run on Windows and they can misbehave on VMs.

Plus Windows isn't too bad to use. was on XP for 10 years without a single crash/malware issue.

Now dual booting LM 17.1 Xfce and Windows 10 Pro...

Mike.

coder123 · Post by **coder123** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 12:35 am

z31fanatic wrote:I chose the school/work option but I want to add that I also like Windows. In fact I like MacOS too and I triple boot my Macbook with all three

Wow I'm impressed at your ability to decide how much space to allocate to each. I just recently within the past month got comfortable with deciding on how to divide up the space for 2 OSes.

mingle wrote:I chose the 6th option.

There are a couple of programs that will only run on Windows and they can misbehave on VMs.

Plus Windows isn't too bad to use. was on XP for 10 years without a single crash/malware issue.

Now dual booting LM 17.1 Xfce and Windows 10 Pro...

Mike.

Wow what apps misbehave in the VM? Also I'm curious to know if you'd consider win10 to be a resource hog as I haven't tried it. I just assumed it is with Cortana and all.

z31fanatic · Post by **z31fanatic** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 12:51 am

coder123 wrote:
Wow I'm impressed at your ability to decide how much space to allocate to each. I just recently within the past month got comfortable with deciding on how to divide up the space for 2 OSes.

The Macbook has a 500GB hard drive. Gave W8.1 (now W10) and Mint 90GB each. The rest is Mac OS X.
It is not easy to triple boot on a Mac because it uses an older version of UEFI so it can't see, read, or boot Linux partitions. I had to use rEFInd in order to boot to Mint.
Plus you need W8.1 or newer in order to have more than 4 partitions. W7 installs in BIOS mode and can only use 4 partitions.

z31fanatic · Post by **z31fanatic** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 12:53 am

coder123 wrote: Also I'm curious to know if you'd consider win10 to be a resource hog as I haven't tried it. I just assumed it is with Cortana and all.

Windows 10 is far from being a resource hog. It's the lightest Windows ever and on modern hardware it's silly fast and stable.

z31fanatic · Post by **z31fanatic** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 1:07 am

Pierre wrote:why do you Triple Boot OR Quad boot ?.

At one point I had 5 different Linux distros on a Dell Latitude. Elementary OS, Mint, Fedora, Zorin, and Deepin. Was just trying to see and choose one to stick with.

BenTrabetere · Post by **BenTrabetere** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 2:19 am

I recently had to replace HDDs and reinstall my operating systems. I planned to dual-boot LM-Mate and Win7, and also set up Win7 in a virtual machine. I installed LM-Mate first (I need to get some work done), and a couple of days later I set up the virtual machine.

The partition I carved out for the Win7 dual-boot sits vacant. The virtual machine works just fine for my needs ... and I just don't have the enthusiasm or patience to endure the wasted hours of applying Windows updates.

coder123 · Post by **coder123** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 3:24 am

BenTrabetere wrote:I recently had to replace HDDs and reinstall my operating systems. I planned to dual-boot LM-Mate and Win7, and also set up Win7 in a virtual machine. I installed LM-Mate first (I need to get some work done), and a couple of days later I set up the virtual machine.

The partition I carved out for the Win7 dual-boot sits vacant. The virtual machine works just fine for my needs ... and I just don't have the enthusiasm or patience to endure the wasted hours of applying Windows updates.

Glad to hear you got satisfied with the virtual machine because if you ended up trying to dual-boot with mint already installed you would've had to reinstall mint because according to what I've heard the windows install would wipe mint no questions asked.

Pjotr · Post by **Pjotr** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 4:39 am

I only boot Windows a few times a year, for updating my TomTom navigation device. Reason: this can only be done in Windows.... So a dual boot remains necessary. No big deal for me, though; I can live with it.

Would like to have a Linux application for updating the TomTom, nevertheless. Oh well.

JohnBobSmith · Post by **JohnBobSmith** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 9:06 am

I do not dual boot currently, because I have no need to. Each of my PC's has its own, singular OS. My server runs Arch, my laptop runs Mint, and my desktop runs Windows 7 (once I get it working, *sigh*). Why the Windows 7 desktop? Mostly for my brother, but I also plan on using it for school/homework purposes with a copy of MS Office, to save headaches later on. LibreOffice is great and all, but not quite compatible enough for me (but its very close).

If one was to dual boot, there could be many advantages/reasons:
-Everything in one place. Providing you make backups and have enough space (I dont), you can keep a healthy windows/linux/whatever on the same drive
-Testing. Testing all the things.
-It would be more cost effective. Why buy a brand new $1200 PC when you can just dual boot and get Windows for $100?
-As a requirement for updating software/devices, as in the case of Pjotr's TomTom
-Hardcore gamers. I'm quite content with Linux gaming for now though.
-Because you like multiple OS's, or are transitioning to a new one. When I first installed Linux, it was a dual boot.
-For the fun of it.

All in all, if you like/need dual booting, go for it. I personally do not dual boot, but there may be many reasons as to why someone would chose to do so.

BenTrabetere · Post by **BenTrabetere** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 10:57 am

coder123 wrote:Glad to hear you got satisfied with the virtual machine because if you ended up trying to dual-boot with mint already installed you would've had to reinstall mint because according to what I've heard the windows install would wipe mint no questions asked.

I was prepared for that. Like I said, I had some work I needed to complete, and I could it with just a stock install of LM. I intended to start from scratch and install Win7 first, but I got distracted by the new version of Virtual Box. I wanted to see if v5 played nicer on my system than v4.x (it does), and so I set up a Win7 virtual machine.

Up to this point I was still prepared to start from scratch. Actually, I was prepared to start from scratch a second time, when Win10 hit the street. What killed the plans for me was the thought of wasting time updating a system that might be used two or three times a year. I lost interest in Win10 when I learned that Automatic Updates could not be turned off.

Fortunately, a Win7 virtual machine satisfies my current needs. If I face a situation that requires booting to Windows I will follow the path of least resistance ... and buy a cheap notebook. Life and my patience is too short.

Crewp · Post by **Crewp** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 11:11 am

Pjotr wrote:I only boot Windows a few times a year, for updating my TomTom navigation device. Reason: this can only be done in Windows.... So a dual boot remains necessary. No big deal for me, though; I can live with it.

Would like to have a Linux application for updating the TomTom, nevertheless. Oh well.

Same reason here, except I have a Garmin GPS, and I have tried to find a work around, but there isn't one.

Fred Barclay · Post by **Fred Barclay** » Wed Aug 05, 2015 7:39 pm

Why do I dual-boot?
Because I can.

I have LMDE Betsy and Kali 1.1.0a on my lappy, Arch and (soon) Debian Sid on my desktop. I'm thinking of triple-booting with Fedora or Arch on my lappy just for the experience--even though I highly prefer apt to yum (pacman is pretty good, though). I'd do even more but I only have 250GB on either machine.
I had the opportunity when I bought my lappy to dual-boot with Windows Vista & Linux. No way! Vista is now safely locked in VBox.

Derek_S · Post by **Derek_S** » Thu Aug 06, 2015 1:04 am

Fred Barclay wrote:Why do I dual-boot?
Because I can.

I love that answer and couldn't agree more. I need Windows because I have a couple of GPS devices that use Windows-only software, and I don't trust using Wine to run the either of the apps because there are occasional firmware updates involved. I don't want to risk turning either device into a brick, especially the GPS/fishfinder/chartplotter unit on my boat, since it costs about 12 times more than the GPS unit in my car.

I installed Linux Mint for two reasons: I've always wanted to get involved with Linux, and I want to have another OS available for use in case I break Windows, which has happened more than once in my life.

coder123 · Post by **coder123** » Thu Aug 06, 2015 2:11 am

JohnBobSmith wrote:I do not dual boot currently, because I have no need to. Each of my PC's has its own, singular OS. My server runs Arch, my laptop runs Mint, and my desktop runs Windows 7 (once I get it working, *sigh*). Why the Windows 7 desktop? Mostly for my brother, but I also plan on using it for school/homework purposes with a copy of MS Office, to save headaches later on. LibreOffice is great and all, but not quite compatible enough for me (but its very close).

I'm curious what exactly is it that LibreOffice can't do for you that MS Office can? I used to have that issue where for me there was one major thing I couldn't do effectively in LO but then I figured out how to and even discovered that with practice I'd be more effective using LO than MS Office. Mine was doing math formulas in the writer program.

Derek_S wrote:
Fred Barclay wrote:Why do I dual-boot?
Because I can.
I installed Linux Mint for two reasons: I've always wanted to get involved with Linux, and I want to have another OS available for use in case I break Windows, which has happened more than once in my life.

What would you do if you broke windows on a dual-booted machine? When I broke windows with a virus that wouldn't go away no matter what I did I ended up overwriting the whole drive with just mint. (I was happy because it was my first installing Linux to make itself the only OS

)

roncraig · Post by **roncraig** » Fri Aug 07, 2015 3:44 pm

Let me explain what I mean when I say that I am in the second transition phase working my way to the third...

I dual boot but not in the way you would think of dual-booting. First, you need to understand that the ONLY reason I have Windows on another hard-drive is because I like to run ARMA II from the bare-metal (no interpretation).

I took all the SSD's/hard-drives out of my system after re-partitioning them and re-formatting them. I then placed ONE drive in the system and installed LM. I then removed that drive and installed the next empty drive and installed Windows on that one.

Then I went back and placed both drives in the system. Upon boot press your favorite key for selecting which drive to boot from (mine is F7), or go into CMOS and tell your system which drive to boot from.

Not the typical way of dual-booting but it keeps everything separated for me.

The only time I boot from the Windows drive is when I want to play ARMA from bare metal... so my default boot drive (in my case) is Linux Mint.

I'm happy with it.

BigEasy · Post by **BigEasy** » Fri Aug 07, 2015 3:51 pm

coder123 wrote:Hey I thought it'd be interesting to make a poll about reasons for dual-booting because my reason for dual-booting has changed over time. IMO dual-booting is one of the phases in making the transition to Linux unless you have particular reason such as running a particular game or app that won't run on Linux or there is no good Linux equivalent. (both of which should fade as reasons as time goes on IMO with equivalents for app being made and porting for games)

What is dual booting? I have not dual booting but triple. All is Linuxes. Change your poll items, please. Or theme's title to "Why do you dual-boot with Windows?"

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