i have two other possibilities at hand, that do not involve two SSDs:
don’t use intentionally broken software in the first place ;-)
use another device for bootloader, could be a readonly CD or a usb drive, PXE/bootp could also do it.
And if your company wants you to use rotten software, they also want you to give them the delays, downtimes and annoyances that naturally come with rotten decisions, just keep that in mind.
Here is one thing to remember and why i call it rotten software and rotten decisions:
Microsoft offers a free “blame the ransomware people” to any CTO who just wants to receive money without working at all or not having to “think” during work. That same CTO can get a bonus after “solving” the ransomware issue and then: “look how ‘invaluable’ that CTO is to the company” he “worked” for month ( yelling at engineers he previously told to install rotten software???) and resolved the ransomware issue!! This is same to those who work. no law has ever given people that many payed breaks from work as “rotten software” vendors did. and if you made a mistake and did not get trained before, you could blame bot beeing trained.
Look at it from a “fingerpointer” point of view, one cloud always blame someone else for everything and the only one to blame is too big to fail and also untouchable due to their army of darkness lawyers. thus anything happened? no one could be guilty AND be held responsible. Also if one is slow at work, and so is his OS, obviously easy to blame someone else again.
so microsoft offers a “solution” to “boss wants you to work more and quicker” but remember, that same boss only “needs” a cover for his own ass to be able to point to someone else and the ones creating the rotten software do deliver that ;-)
i do not know any better wording for such a situation than “rotten” thus i name it so.
Picture this: you buy a car. You buy a new set of wheels/rims and a new radio system with Android and whatever. You also put some new carpets on the floor of the car. Now you need to take it for a simple routine maintenance and checkup at the car brand official shop. After a few hours you go back there to pick you car up and it has the stock wheels, stock radio, stock carpets and everything and you ask where the hell is your stuff and ALL of them on the shop look at you confused like if they never seen any different accessory on that car before other than the stock ones, or don’t know what you are talking about. All they know is that the car is now “according to spec”.
This is what it feels like after updating Windows with Linux in dual-boot on the same drive.
Ugh, that’s so annoying. Every time windows updates i have to open the BIOS and put ubuntu first on the boot order so it doesn’t skip grub.
I Also have a drive that i can access on both linux and Windows and every so often Windows will make it inaccessible on Linux because it didn’t fully unmount the drive.
I think their logic behind this complete bullshit is if they make it hard enough on you to dual boot, you’ll just stick with windows. I switched over a year ago, never looking back and seeing posts like this one makes me feel even better about it.
I have an old, spinning rust WinBlows, easily inserted in the ex-cdrom slot of my bathtub movie lenovo t440p, because once a year or so I need to upgrade the firmware of some crap that has no other option. Wastes about 24 hrs of (annoying but small) power updating each time. May this pass, in time. (like tears in rain :)
I should get around to imaging it onto a SSD, but I don’t, due to distaste, and then I need it again. :(.
That’s what I’m doing too, running fine but when I reinstall windows for whatever reason (mainly for it being slow and buggy) I disconnect linux drive because one time it broke my grub by messing with efi partition (nothing unrepairable but annoying at least)
It’s the usual problem: if your employer IT refuses to budge, you get locked into a Windows (or Apple) ecosystem. I had the same. My solution was to remove myself from corporate IT, and use my own device.
I use workarounds for the interfaces with corporate:
MS Teams Linux client (sadly discontinued as of 2022) still works out of a jail, but the browser solution is also tested and ready as backup should I be forced
Webmail instead of a proper mail proram - that’s a big trade-off, but I can work with it, as much as it sucks
Webex for conferencing (as it works properly with Firefox, contrary to many other solutions)
Web portals continue to work - even though sometimes I need a user agent switcher to pretend I am using chrome (fuck you @MS Teams)
In the end, web front-ends always allow to expose selected parts of any kind of internal (potentially insecure) protocols to the internet through a demilitarized zone that only allows https protocol.
It’s like being allowed to watch the data you are interested in through a glass window, but no touching :)
The €10 I pay a year for Exquilla is worth its weight in gold. It’s about the only thing on my system that’s not FOSS, but I’m not even mad because it works. 9.5/10 would recommend.
Yes that’s due to Exchange. Thank you for the pointer to Exquilla - I’d gladly be willing to pay for that out of my own pocket, but there’s three problems:
closed source plugin, which I don’t want on my machine if I can avoid it
convincing my company to expose EWS (unless OWA uses the same interface, which I doubt?)
I’m using kde5 on X. To my knowledge, the only issues you might have with Nvidia on Linux is if you want to use Wayland instead of X. Unless you are someone who refuses to use non-free drivers for philosophical reasons, but then you wouldn’t be using Windows.
I’ve been running an Nvidia GPU for over 6 years now on Linux without issues.
I even am using a fairly recent 4070ti and was able to use it with proprietary drivers soon after launch and was running cyberpunk 2077 at 4k with high settings and ray tracing with an average 60fps with dsr.
I also use the cuda cores for running open source llms locally and have no issues there either.
On windows they make you install their annoying software to do driver updates and it sends random notifications and has a bunch of ads and other things I don’t want when installing software.
I mean I can take up issues with Linux as well. The driver support can be iffy at times, especially with Nvidia, gaming can be a challenge, depending on what game you’re playing.
“Not that bad” is a phrase, which acknowledges issues but still contests something to be bad beyond acceptance.
Oh please, half the time on most computers after installing stock Windows you’ll need to install the NIC drivers from a USB stick because you can’t download drivers locally without a NIC. With Linux, it pretty works out the gate. Significant driver issues haven’t been a real issue with Linux in about a decade.
Nvidia drivers are especially weird to use as an example. Since the advent of AI, Nvidia Linux support has vastly improved since most AI use cases require Linux. It’s enterprise-ready at this point.
As for the games that don’t work well - the binaries were only built for Windows, so Linux has to jump through hoops to run them. That’s not Linux’s fault, it’s the fault of the game developers. Thanks to the FOSS community those hoops are only getting easier to jump through. Most of the games that don’t work at all depend on some sort of horrific anti-cheat rootkit that any tech literate person should consider a dealbreaker even if they use Windows as a daily driver.
And the games that do work, which is most of the games on Steam at this point, perform better on Linux than Windows on the same hardware because they don’t have to deal with the bloat of a Windows OS.
I guess if you can accept ads crammed into every nook and cranny of the OS, constantly fighting with Edge over your choice of browser, reduced battery life and system performace due to OS bloat, having every single aspect of your computing experience built around corporate profits rather than user experience, and buying a computer every few years because of planned obsolescence you could settle with a bad OS like Windows.
I always say, an OS is a tool, not a religion. I use Linux at home 98% of the time because it fits what I need to do and it’s snappier than Windows on my hardware and gives me more control, or maybe I know better how to do certain things in Linux nowadays that I’ve left Windows mostly behind. I use Windows at work because that’s what dictated, and also because MS Visio is only on Windows (I could use MacOS with Omnigraffle, but Macs are not available at my pay grade. Whatever). They pay me to work and be productive, and this means using Outlook/Teams, AD SSO integration with Edge, all the VPNs/network control/DLP agents. And luckily now I can use Linux subsystem in Windows, so I can work on the cli when I need to do something fancy. They don’t pay me to spend hours trying to find a way to work with their systems other than what’s supported.
On the topic at hand (bootloader issues). Never had a problem personally, but Iast time I did proper dual booting (on the same drive) was with Windows8.1. Now I have different drives, with the bios configured to boot from the drive with Linux. If I want to boot on Windows 10 I actually have to change the boot sequence. And even then there is grub (from an old dual boot setup).
It actually is worse than “that bad”. Windows 2000 wasn’t “that bad” - everything after that has gone downhill.
Objective reasons why Windows is extremely shitty:
with every new Windows version, the same settings are shuffled around and users have to re-learn the interfaces to find stuff they had been able to easily find before
bloatware
tons of software is shoved down your throat with opt-out options either not available, or you have to jump through literal hoops to get there
Only reason I keep a Windows install on an SSD for my laptop: my schools remote test proctoring service only works with Windows and Mac. I normally run pop_os on it but switch to the windows when I have to take a test.
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