Linux

recently I have encountered a problem with this, it is indeed not so straightforward to create a bootable windows 10 USB instillation media under linux.

The media created by fedora media writer is not bootable and the media created by ventoy lacks drivers. I was then able to create a media quite easily with the last windows machine in my household. I don't know if it is a temporary bug or fundamental incompatibility.

So I would suggest you to keep a windows installation media at hand in case you need to switch back, or make sure at least one of your friend has a windows machine you can borrow.

If you have a flash drive and an external disk you can boot into Rescuezilla (a disk cloning/backup/restore distribution) using the flash drive, save/backup your OS disk as an image in the external disk, and restore it as needed. After restoration, you will have your OS disk as it was at the time you saved it.

You need to buy a separate $25 SSD for Windows. Do not attempt to have both Linux and Windows on same HDD/SSD, Windows will always kill Linux.

A safe method to go about a debloated and privacy friendly (yes it's possible) Windows installation is using AME Project's playbook with their Wizard tool, on top of a fresh ISO you get from Microsoft. For activation, use the tools from https://massgrave.dev website, HWID activation.

After installing Windows, consider using simplewall as your program firewall and to limit Microsoft telemetry heavily.

Avoid installing random crap, and use a solid antivirus like Kaspersky (ignore political nonsense, merit matters) if you pirate TV shows, movies and software.

I cannot tolerate Windows other than how AME Project does it. Their playbook is better than AtlasOS and other playbooks.

If you want to test out Linux, try running a virtual machine instead. There are a few good free software programs to do this. VirtualBox used to be a good option. It's a free and harmless way to dive into Linux.

So I will get some flack from this I am sure but my daily drivers since about 2004 are Linux I have always had a Mac laptop up to a few years ago in that time frame and Windows work laptops.

Honestly Windows 11 has a lot of nice creature features that KDE has had for a while and with WSL I can use a lot of my Linux commands. Can tell you how many times I have used egrep for things along with having native ssh built in. Powershell is a very powerful shell language especially if you want to go down the .Net rabbit hole but that’s not usually needed

Still my main desktop is Debian stable with distrobox for apps I need more modern versions of. But it’s not hard to switch back and forth

Just buy a new SSD to install Linux on. If you decide to switch back just plug the old one in.

When I first wanted to try Linux out I made a small 50gb partition for it. the logic was that this was the size of just one game and it was an entire operating system, so I wasn't losing much. As I continued to use Linux I kept expanding that partition to correspond with the priority I gave the OS.

Do a dual boot, that's what I did. If after some time you feel like the windows partition is unnecessary, delete it. If after deletion it suddenly seems to become necessary, it is always possible to reinstall windows, there are tutorials online on how to do that.