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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

The best option is to run a Windows host with WSL and an extra EXT4 volume mounted to both windows and linux (this is a non issue as long as it's not the boot drive for linux). User WSL for everything linux, optionally you can also just mount the EXT4 volume with all your stuff to a real VM if you need to (this lets you have windows GUI apps in windows, tho maybe WSL does this now too?). Everything works, you have the best of all worlds.

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I would recommend dual booting over doing this. Microsoft is user hostile and the only thing they care about Windows users is how much ad revenue they can get from shoving AI down their users throats.

I recommend doing a dual boot. I personally do a multi drive dual boot, because again, Microsoft is user hostile and will sometimes randomly just blow away the Linux EFI partition if they're both on the same drive. . If you have them on seperate drives and boot to the Linux drive by default you can then select Windows from the GRUB OS chooser menu. This way when Windows updates and makes changes the EFI partition its only doing it to its own drive.

This will give you the best of both worlds, the privacy and user freedom of Linux, and the ability to game on the Microslop.

Dual booting is hell, it's never good, it's never been good. I don't use my computer in a modal way. Willing to accept booting over as a friction point is crazy. You can just disable windows update and all the nags and then it's just a good operating system, mine often runs for many months without reboot. I have never seen a single ad in my OS.

It's absolutely not the best of both worlds if I can't simultaneously game (or run CAD software in my case) while running torch w/ triton at the same time.

To each their own. I've been dual booting Linux for a decade, at first to learn Linux, and for the past half decade as the secondary OS for the 1/10 games that don't work under Linux. I'm a Linux engineer so all my workflows are Linux focused and I prefer the customizability, flexibility and hackability of Linux to Windows anyways.

I don't trust the Windows OS with any of my personal files. Even if you disable updates Windows is continuously pinging Microsoft, Bing and adtech servers. It continuously prompts you to install OneDrive and upload your files to their cloud and adds TikTok/Facebook/to start menu on a fresh install and you have to use a hacky workaround to actually do an offline install without logging into a Microsoft account. I'm looking forward to the day that Steam Linux has full game compatability and I can finally purge Windows from my system.

Ahhh, I see the issue, you must be using a Windows other than Windows 10 LTSB and presumably you don't trust your router. I dual booted for a long time before VMs were good, but the user experience of booting over is just so awful.

I did not understand the extra EXT4 volume. Do you mind explaining me the advantages of this workflow?

If you mount the Linux OS volume under windows while it's running it can get all fucked up because the two operating systems are not chill about who's really in control. You can avoid this by keeping the linux OS on it's own volume, but putting all the user data on a separate volume, you CAN mount this under both operating systems and get good speeds under both OSs, wheras using WSL native ability to access the host NTFS system is very very slow.

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