I have been planning to install Kinoite on my laptop, dual booting with Windows.
However depending on what I read online, it is either not possible, not recommended, tricky to setup or it is just a matter of setting partitions up before installing Kinoite. Broad range of opinions and no good "tutorial" how to do it.
Anyone having direct experience with that?
Most exhaustive write-up on dual-booting Fedora Atomic and Windows 10 that I've found.
FWIW, I've done it and my system works as you'd expect.
Awesome, that is exactly the type of first hand experience and description I was looking for! Thanks!
Is there anything to be expected when updating the system to a new version? Maybe you haven't done that yet...
Thanks!
It has been my pleasure 😊.
Is there anything to be expected when updating the system to a new version?
The write-up found above ensures that the two systems don't share any space within the same drive. Therefore, there's nothing to worry about.
For example, I've upgraded Fedora from 39 to 40 about two months ago without any troubles. Heck, I'm on Bluefin's
:latest. So, the update to 40 happened automatically in the background without notifying me. So, with the very next reboot I suddenly found myself on 40 😅. I probably wouldn't even have noticed any difference were it not that some GNOME extensions didn't work right away. Otherwise, it was a perfectly smooth update.
Most stable for me was 2 OS drives 1 storage, sorry it'll have to be Windows file system.
I'd recommend getting into your bios and disabling features that push windows as it won't give you the choice to also take the Windows OS drive out of primary.
Install windows first on one OS drive, then Linux on the other.
rEFInd used to be the bootloader I used and stopped windows messing about with the boot.
What's the need for Windows? Is it something you can virtualise?
"Need" for windows is just my wife who uses the same laptop. VM might be an idea but it will still be "different" and she is not very technical. So yeah, it has to be dual boot for the beginning, so I might in the end just go for a different distro that is easier to set this up with.
I highly recommend the same. Fedora on one, Windows on one, and a shared NTFS drive. There are a couple of Windows ‘features’ to disable, like fast boot, that don’t play nice with the storage drive.
It's difficult if you have disk encryption on the same drive that you want to install Kinoite. Otherwise, its just a matter of setting drive partitions.
No encryption as far as I am aware of, unless its standard in windows 10 and I don't know about it. I have experience with partitioning, so I'll have a think if this is worth trying or not.
Have already backed up important windows files anyway.
So basically
ostree deployfails if you have an existing populated ESP (EFI System Partition), so you’ll have to partition manually atm (in my case, I just made another ESP on the same disk). Other than that, I haven’t run into any problems with Win11 + Fedora on the same disk, mostly because I don’t boot into windows.You can read about the issue here: https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/284
Here’s the docs on manual partitioning: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-silverblue/installation/#manual-partition
It’s definitely a pain. One of many papercuts you’ll find with an “emerging” desktop edition on a distro already known to push new stuff before the Linux ecosystem is ready.
Just be sure to make a backup of your windows data in a separate disk, keep boot drives for normal fedora (in case this ends up being too difficult), windows (in case you give up), and Fedora Kinoite (because duh), and ffs, don’t trust ChatGPT with your sensitive data on your main PC :)
Thanks! I have seen those links but haven't had time to read them fully yet, they looked like just discussing around the issue to me, not solving it. But I will have a closer look again, thanks for highlighting those.
