I've been happily Windows-free for about 5 years, but lately I need some Win-only software including a few games that don't work at all on Linux. My main questions:
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How to avoid Windows messing with my Linux install? Having a separate PC is not possible for me right now. I'm considering uninstalling grub and instead selecting the boot device I want from UEFI, idk if this is advisable though.
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I'm also interested in how to get a Windows install that's as minimal as possible: I don't want to log in to a Microsoft account, I don't want telemetry etc, I only want whatever is strictly required to make my system functional. The one thing I do want is Windows Defender cause ain't no way I'm dealing with an antivirus.
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Should I go for Win 11 or stick to 10?
Any tips or experiences are welcome!
Ps: I know this information is probably all out there, but I thought a post in this community about it would be useful for others as well.
UPDATE: I ended up going with a regular old dual boot using Windows 10 iot LTSC - there's a few games I wanted to run and a driver as well so I chose to install directly on hardware as opposed to a VM. I created the install media using Ventoy, and UNPLUGGED EVERY OTHER DRIVE during installation except the one Windows was supposed to come on. Afterwards I had to boot in with a live Linux USB (the nice thing about Ventoy is that you can write multiple ISOs to your USB so it came in handy) to manually install rEFInd onto the original EFI partition that my Linux install uses, then I just had to set up the correct boot order in UEFI and everything is working. I also had to fuck around on the boot partition and with efibootmgr to remove all traces of grub so things don't get tangled up which was a bit scary but things are working perfectly now.
My first line of investigation here would be virtualization. It will solve the "don't mess with my Linux install" problem and will let you use the windows apps you need at the same time as the Linux apps you normally use. Also VMs have all their other useful features like snapshots and portability.
I did this in the distant past and it was quite convenient having the VM instead of a dual boot.
Yeah, VMs are a good route since the OP didn't mention gaming.
I should have, gonna edit the post
I recommend QEMU/KVM with GPU passthrough (will require two GPUs but an iGPU will suffice for the host Linux install if you don't need a powerful GPU for it). You don't get complete bare metal performance but it's close.
You can do USB passthrough for your gaming peripherals with the windows-only drivers installed on the VM.
I actually do this now for video games but with a windows VM running on a headless proxmox host that I remote into with Parsec. I had to scrap and remake the VM a few times in the beginning while figuring everything out but the VM has been going strong without breaking for around 1.5 years now.
I used to use my VM a lot for gaming. Unfortunately as of late the games I’ve been wanting to play like spectre divide were blocking VM users.
I still think that a gpu passthrough VM is super cool though. I did mine with only one gpu too.
@friend_of_satan @recarsion yes, I’ve been using Windows 11 as a guest OS in VirtualBox for two months, after I switched to Linux as my main OS. I like it much more than dual booting.
Good thinking, I'll definitely look into that. One caveat is I'm going to need a driver that's also Win-only so I'll have to see if that works in a VM.
For what hardware?
Fanatec racing wheel and pedals - although this one technically works on Linux as well through hid-fanatecff which is what I'm currently using but the official ones would be better