Dual Boot Best Practices?

speck@kbin.social to Linux@lemmy.ml – 33 points –

Will be installing either Mint or Pop_OS on a new laptop which has a 512gb SSD. Will keep Windows for gaming, at least for now, with the games installed on an external HD. But otherwise, this is to experiment with living in Linux.

I understand that I can unallocate HD space from Windows in order to make room for the LInux OS, leaving at least 25 or 30gb for the Linux OS itself.

Do I then extend that space further, so to speak, to allow for any other programs I might install as well as for data? Do I create a third partition for data that will be shared between the two OS?

What's a reasonable breakdown?

e.g.
Windows 100gb; Linux 400gb or
Win 100gb; Linux 30gb; Data (NTFS) 370gb?

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Keep a minimum of 30GB free, for Windows update processes on the windows system partition. I don't how much the windows installation counts in space, but add that to the 30gb free space. I would recommend to have a extra partition for the games on NTFS and move your steam, epic, ubisoft, whatever library to that partition.

I have tried to use the same gaming partition between Linux and Windows, but failed every time. In the worst case this can alter your Windows privileges. At least I had this issue.

Currently I'm using Windows only for 2 games: Space Engineers and Empyrion. The rest works with better performance on Linux. Satisfactory, Ark survival, Elder Scrolls Online have more FPS on Linux with the same settings. I have to use a nvidia 1050 Ti in my laptop. With a AMD GPU the situation is a lot better on Linux.

I'm not a hardcore gamer, mostly im coding here and there. But sometimes gaming is a must have.

Space Engineers is such a good game

I was going to put games on an external hard drive, at least for Windows side. Maybe I should also partition the external HD and have an ext4 formatted partition for when I decide to game on the Linux side?

Yes. Because some games work only with proper privileges. This can get complicated on NTFS.