Dual Boot dilemma
Hello there,
I just want to buy a new gaming system, laptop, because I want to be mobile. There is only one game I cant give up that is league of legends. So I'm searching a manufactor, which can handle dual boot perfectly. I mean everytime I boot into windows and want to reboot into linux again, so my entry is gone (refind, systems and grub). Maybe there is a brand which separate two OS Hardware wise or has a BIOS espacially for such a case?
if you get a coreboot compatible laptop you can burn GRUB into your firmware so that it can't ever be destroyed by windows.
Then you can boot into linux by having GRUB load the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file in your linux FS, or load windows by chainloading into another payload in firmware (e.g. SeaBIOS) that can load windows.
This is kinda advanced though, and there is a big limitation in that you can only run BIOS (not UEFI) because EDK2, which is the only coreboot payload that can do UEFI can't be chainloaded into from grub
Your best bet is a secondary M2 slot, there are some laptops that allow for that. You install windows on the first, main ssd. Then you DISABLE that ssd (or you unplug it intenrally), you install linux on the second ssd, and then you enable back the first one. Then you can select using F12 during boot which ssd you want to boot from, by default it'd be windows.
I see you're from Germany. Well, Tuxedo computers have many laptop models with two ssds in it.
The UEFI boot system is tricky and you need to get along with Secure Boot to do this. Secure Boot is outside of the Linux kernel. Both Fedora and Ubuntu have systems for this. Fedora uses the Anaconda system and I believe they do it best. I have had a W11 partition for 2 years and never used it once. It can't even get on the internet with my firewall setup, but it is there and never had any issues the 3 times I logged into it.
I think all of the Fedora systems support the shim key and secure boot but I know Workstation does. For Ubuntu I think it is just the regular vanilla Ubuntu desktop that the shim supports. This may be somewhat sketchy with Nvidia or maybe not. Nvidia """"open sourced"""" their kernel code but the actual nvcc compiler required to build the binaries is still proprietary crap.
I have a 3080Ti gaming laptop. It isn't half bad with 16 GB of video RAM from all the way back in 2021. Nvidia is artificially holding back the vram because of monopoly nonsense. The new stuff has very little real consumer value as a result, at least with AI stuff I run. The hardware is a little faster, but more vram is absolutely critical and new stuff that is the same or worse than what I have from 3 generations and nearly 5 years ago is ridiculous.
The battery life blows and the GPU likely won't even work on battery. It will get donkey balls hot with AI workloads, especially any kind of image gen. This results in lots of thermal throttling. All AI packages run as servers on your network. If you are thinking along these lines if running your own models, get a tower and run the thing remotely.
I manage, and need the ergonomics for physical disability reasons, but I still would prefer to have a separate tower to run models from.
Anyways, you can sign your own UEFI keys to use any distro, but this can be daunting for some people. The US defense department has a good PDF guide on setting your own keys. The UEFI bootloader for the machine may not have all key signing features implemented. There is a way to boot into UEFI directly and set the keys manually but this is not easy to find great guides on how to do it step by step. Gentoo has a tutorial on this, but it assumes a high level of competency.
Other than signing your own keys, the shim keys mentioned are special keys signed by Microsoft for the principal maintainer of the distro. These slide under the Microsoft key to keep secure boot enabled.
If you boot any secure boot enabled OS, the bootloader is required to delete any bootable unsigned code it finds. It does not matter if it is a shimmed Fedora or W11. If you have any other OS present in the boot list, it should be deleted. W11 is SB only, and this is where the real issues arise.
I never had problem with dual boot on any laptop on uefi.Main problem was windows which on update was changing efi partition so I disabled autoupdates,disabled secure boot,and disabled bitlocker then u will be fine and grub gonna work
Can't disable secure boot caus of anti cheat rootkit
Still not problem https://github.com/SamuelTulach/SecureFakePkg
Gang you gotta edit your fstabs properly and also turn os prober on probably. But if that's too much then just install a Linux distro on an external drive already
can u boot Linux of a USB? some USB drives give 1000mbps read so should be nice and snappy for a root fs
Why not buy/use another drive and install Windows on that? Generally, you shouldn't have a problem with dual-booting on separate drives. You would probably need an external drive since you want a laptop, but they're pretty small these days.
Not true. Many laptops especially ThinkPad have a secondary M.2 slot.
Ah, cool. Might be a good option for OP, then.
Agreed. Windows updates will very likely break your single-drive dual-boot at some point. So, use two different drives and use your bios/efi to choose which one to boot.
Edit: check out https://hackaday.com/2021/11/30/linux-fu-the-ultimate-dual-boot-laptop/
Edit 2: Framework 16 looks like it would meet your needs. It has two M.2 sockets for drives. https://frame.work/products/laptop16-diy-amd-7040
I have two separate drives
So use one for Windows and one for Linux. Problem solved, IMO.