Dual boot CachyOS now, to get accustomed to it; it’s more-or-less exactly what SteamOS will be. It’s built on Arch, too. They ship a bunch of extra Proton stuff with the OS. There’s even a “deckified” kernel option.
They’re official, so that’s the first place to look.
But in general, I guess it depends on what you already know and have. Do you have a laptop with a single disk? Or a desktop with more than one? Do you know anything about disk partitioning and such? Do you want to clean install Windows, or keep it as-is?
My solution to dual booting Windows today would be to generally follow the wiki guide, use refind as your bootloader, KDE as your desktop, read up on partitioning, and make a second EFI partition to install CachyOS onto.
To simplify, an EFI partition is the “thing that your motherboard uses to boot into your operating system,” so you just make two of them so they can’t touch each other.
This is less convenient; if something messes up, you might have to mash a function key on boot to switch between Windows/Linux. But it heads off several potential issues. Like Windows Update messing with EFI randomly so Linux won’t boot (which it rarely does), or your default Windows EFI partition being too small (which it probably is).
Meh. Like I said, it’s pretty much just a gaming PC. I also have a steam deck, my laptop is running Mint, and like 15 years ago I ran Linux Ubuntu. It isn’t that I need to get familiar. It’s that I just don’t want to mess around with swapping an OS again and again. All my games are running on windows and I play a couple games that aren’t compatible on Linux every so often, so I’m not in a hurry to change.
What I did for many games is just leave them on a shared NTFS partition so I can play them on either Windows or Linux.
Or you can literally just mount your windows partition.
I sympathize, I still mostly use stripped Windows 11 for gaming (and Linux for other stuff). But we’re going to have to switch sooner or later, and it increasingly seems to be “sooner”
I know exactly when to switch (November 2026), how to do it, and what to do. I’m not going to screw with dual booting for no reason for only a year, won’t use win 10 after it stops getting security updates, and won’t go to windows 11. In November I’ll switch to a Linux distro and be done with the setup within the day. Whatever distro at the time seems best suited for having as a gaming PC.
Why wait?
Dual boot CachyOS now, to get accustomed to it; it’s more-or-less exactly what SteamOS will be. It’s built on Arch, too. They ship a bunch of extra Proton stuff with the OS. There’s even a “deckified” kernel option.
It’s built on Arch, btw?
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The wikis are very good: https://wiki.cachyos.org/installation/installation_prepare/
And more general info: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Main_page
They’re official, so that’s the first place to look.
But in general, I guess it depends on what you already know and have. Do you have a laptop with a single disk? Or a desktop with more than one? Do you know anything about disk partitioning and such? Do you want to clean install Windows, or keep it as-is?
My solution to dual booting Windows today would be to generally follow the wiki guide, use refind as your bootloader, KDE as your desktop, read up on partitioning, and make a second EFI partition to install CachyOS onto.
To simplify, an EFI partition is the “thing that your motherboard uses to boot into your operating system,” so you just make two of them so they can’t touch each other.
This is less convenient; if something messes up, you might have to mash a function key on boot to switch between Windows/Linux. But it heads off several potential issues. Like Windows Update messing with EFI randomly so Linux won’t boot (which it rarely does), or your default Windows EFI partition being too small (which it probably is).
Meh. Like I said, it’s pretty much just a gaming PC. I also have a steam deck, my laptop is running Mint, and like 15 years ago I ran Linux Ubuntu. It isn’t that I need to get familiar. It’s that I just don’t want to mess around with swapping an OS again and again. All my games are running on windows and I play a couple games that aren’t compatible on Linux every so often, so I’m not in a hurry to change.
What I did for many games is just leave them on a shared NTFS partition so I can play them on either Windows or Linux.
Or you can literally just mount your windows partition.
I sympathize, I still mostly use stripped Windows 11 for gaming (and Linux for other stuff). But we’re going to have to switch sooner or later, and it increasingly seems to be “sooner”
I know exactly when to switch (November 2026), how to do it, and what to do. I’m not going to screw with dual booting for no reason for only a year, won’t use win 10 after it stops getting security updates, and won’t go to windows 11. In November I’ll switch to a Linux distro and be done with the setup within the day. Whatever distro at the time seems best suited for having as a gaming PC.
Trying to use Linux for gaming teaches you a lot, though.
You might start at least a month early so you can make a more educated switch before you literally cannot fall back to Windows.
What part of I’ve already done this shit are you not getting? Lol