Why does my pc have a heart attack everytime this bloatware updates? Then it takes forever to load once I shutdown and restart. Thanks Bill Gate$ (satan).
You can run games on linux now, it is unironically the year(s) of the linux desktop!
Only piece of advice I'd give is not to try to set up dual-boot unless you know what you're doing. If you overwrite windows and install only linux it will almost certainly succeed, especially if you use a nice user-friendly distro. Dual-boot introduces a lot of complexity and I wouldn't recommend it unless you really want to learn a lot of stuff about UEFI and bootloaders. It might work but if it doesn't work you are extremely hosed unless you really know what you're doing.
To be honest, as someone that does dual-boot, I don't think it's as complex as you make it seem. Only caveat is I wouldn't install both on a single disk, though, Windows will immediately fuck up the UEFI entries for you and that will take complex intervention.
With two drives you can dual boot very easily, though.
I hard disagree. Putting linux on a different disk from windows is even more complicated and distro installers cannot handle it. If you install it on the same disk as windows most distro installers do an okay job.
After reading someone posting advice like yours I tried to install a dual-boot on separate disks using ubuntu. Managed to trash both windows & linux installs, making my computer unbootable. Two years later I committed to installing Arch so had to teach myself all about UEFI and bootloaders and boot partitions and MBR vs. GPT partition tables and and and and... - finally got it working. This isn't even getting into the notorious footguns where windows sets wake-on-lan/magic packet flags in the NIC volatile memory which the linux network driver can't understand so your internet connection fails in very mysterious ways. Or the hibernate & fast boot stuff.
Point being there are just wayway too many moving parts to ever recommend dual boot to anybody. It is a great way to make somebody have a terrible experience and never try linux again.
I think maybe the Ubuntu installer was just fucked back then or something. I've done multiple installs with Calamares in the past two years and had no issues. A laptop and desktop, Intel/Nvidia and AMD/AMD. Installing Linux was never an issue but getting an offline (no Microsoft account) install of Windows 11 to go through was a major pain in the ass.
Maybe I'm just ignorant as to how complex it seems to others, or to the installers of other distros. With Fedora, it honestly was as complex as Boot from USB > Run Installer > Select blank hard drive to install to > Keep clicking next > Done. That was honestly it, no bootloader messing, no UEFI messing, no nothing. Excluding boot/load times it'd be like a 30 seconds video guide.
Maybe the Ubuntu installer really was so bad that it overwrote boot entries by default, but I'm honestly mad if they fucked up that bad. As a power user that does fuck with my boot shit for fun, I don't think I've ever delved as far as it sounds like you have.
However, I certainly agree whatever the case, that just installing Linux will be simpler and easier.
I've used linux since like 2017 ish. Dual boot at first but later windows fried the hard disk. Then completely linux. At that time I used manjaro. Most games I used to play just worked. Lutris rocks.
Dual boot works great if they're on separate drives and Linux is the default boot drive. The grub menu lets me pick my Windows drive as well as my other Linux drive. That said I use Windows like once per month for 1 or 2 things and then run away screaming and crying back to Linux as soon as I'm done.
If you separately install each OS to a separate drive (no dual booting) then it works fine, there's no mixing of boot entries or partitions. Just use manual boot override on your motherboard to select the other if you want to switch to the other OS.
Memory is hazy since this was three years ago but I remember windows not handling/liking multiple EFI partitions. Perhaps that has changed, or the disk order matters or something.
You may also encounter this issue if a second hard drive is added that has a pre-existing EFI partition and bootable OS on it as well. Because of differences in hardware and firmware boot options, it's unknown which Windows OS will be set as the primary boot disk.
I dual boot Ubuntu with Windows 10 on a second drive since 2-3 years, but I don't understand why it works then. I only have one EFI partition (whatever that is) though, on my Linux drive, and I can boot from either drive just fine.