Honestly, I always HATED dual-booting off one drive. It’s infuriating and Windows can and will fuck your boot loader. I always found it so much easier to just have two disks and select which one I wanted to boot from the quick-post boot menu, or hopefully have a grub that matches the windows drive. That way both disks stay agnostic of the boot partitions and partition types. When I was a runt in college I had a laptop with a drive tray back when those were a thing. Now I just run Windows in QEMU on my laptops.

I’m going to go against the grain a bit and suggest trying Linux in a virtual machine instead of dual booting.

In case you haven’t heard of them, virtual machines are like a computer inside your computer. You can set up as many as you like, as long as you have the space, and if they go wrong, they won’t affect the rest of your computer. You can set them up to share a folder with Windows for accessing your files.

The reason I’m suggesting a virtual machine is because you use your computer for school. Linux is very user friendly these days, and pretty easy to set up, but this seems to be something that you’re new to, so you won’t know how to fix any problems that come up.

If you’ve got school work due and something goes wrong, you don’t want to be fixing the computer instead of doing your work.

Once you’ve got some experience, then look at dual booting.

P.S. Mint is a great choice :)

I do this every day and the only problems I have is that it throws off Windows’ system clock (requiring a manual re-sync) and I have to re-pair my bluetooth headphones every time

To add to what others have said, I’d recommend installing Windows first, then Linux. Windows tends to assume it’s the only OS that exists, so if there’s anything else on the boot sector (eg. your fresh new Linux install), it’ll just overwrite it without even checking lol.

Yep, I dual boot on my laptop so that I can run certain programs for my schoolwork as well. I use Refind as my boot manager so that I can easily select one or the other on startup.

Yes, it’s super easy to do as well. Most distro installers give you the option to automatically install for dual-boot without any manual partitioning.

Definitely try Mint, I was on it for years and it is very thoughtfully designed for stability and ease if use.

The hardest part will be getting the liveUSB made for the Linux ISO. You can find some simple tools like Balena Etcher that make it easy though.

Dual boot exists for a long time. You just have to make sure your drive is partitioned with the GPT table and not the MBR one

First if all, welcome to Linux. I also found it in my high school/college years and am so glad I did. Things will be weird. I remember thinking “what kind of Fisher Price OS is this?” because Ubuntu was so simple looking back then and I was used to the unnecessary clutter of Windows. There is so much to explore, but I think you are on a good path with Mint. I have also run Mint for a few years and love some of the things it does.

A helpful note: If you plan on sharing files between the two OSes, be aware that Windows won’t typically access a Linux file system like ext4 or btrfs and Linux can handle NTFS (windows) in a lot of cases, but if you have bitlocker running you may have additional hurdles.

I highly recommend getting a big external drive ans backing up regularly (like at least once a week). At some point you will screw up and be glad you did it. I only overwrote a disk partition on accident once, and I recovered the data, but I also learned my lesson the hard way. Don’t be like me!

I did something slightly different. I dual boot windows and linux. But each one is on a different hard drive. I have two SSDs that each one is dedicated to. Makes things easier.

I agree with the others that testing in a VM (Virtual Machine) first is probably a good idea. Keep in mind that because of missing 3D acceleration inside a VM things like desktop animations might not work.

As for distros, I’d recommend Mint or Fedora. I personally use Fedora.

What’s also important is the desktop environment you choose. The most popular ones are GNOME and KDE Plasma. GNOME is closer to MacOS than Windows and is made to just work while KDE Plasma has a layout similar to Windows out of the box but is very customizable and has a lot of options. Ubuntu uses GNOME but they make quite a few changes to it. Fedora uses GNOME by default but there’s also a KDE Plasma version, I think. Mint doesn’t have these 2 by default, you can always install them if you want to afterwards tho. The 3 options Mint gives you are also more Windows-like but I haven’t tried them myself, so I can’t tell you much about them. A VM would give you the ability to just install them, try them out and delete them afterwards. I personally use GNOME btw.

It is very difficult for a person who is too lazy to google for an answer. I don’t recommend.