Theres a lot of bad suggestions in the replies so I’ll provide another upvote for getting a cheap second drive (crucial has a 256 ssd for $20), installing Linux on a second disk like that is simplest. Once it’s installed, Linux can mount the original windows drive natively (the reverse is not true, which is unfortunate but makes sense given the market share of each of the different disk formats like ext3/4, btrfs, zfs, etc…windows just uses ntfs and Linux supports that). If your main drive is encrypted you will need the recovery key so make sure you grab that first (google bitlocker recovery key).
You might say “you’re ignoring the idea that some people have a laptop” but honestly Linux itself kinda ignores that idea in a lot of cases. In that case you’d likely have to have windows shrink your main partition by ~50+100gb and then do a dual boot which is a little more annoying.
Yes two drives is much better than using the same drive to dual boot. However be aware that windows update will at some point break the Linux install even if installed on a second drive. There’s a few steps you can take to avoid this like making sure the boot partition and booy manager ate both on the Linux only drive but Microsoft messing something up is an inevitability.
If on a laptop with only one drive, you could boot to a USB drive or USB external enclosure for an SSD.
Ideally, you should back up all data to an external drive which is only plugged in during backups (unplug when installing another os). I would even recommend windows users booting into clonezilla and cloning their windows drive as it is really easy to overwrite or format the wrong drive.
Theres a lot of bad suggestions in the replies so I’ll provide another upvote for getting a cheap second drive (crucial has a 256 ssd for $20), installing Linux on a second disk like that is simplest. Once it’s installed, Linux can mount the original windows drive natively (the reverse is not true, which is unfortunate but makes sense given the market share of each of the different disk formats like ext3/4, btrfs, zfs, etc…windows just uses ntfs and Linux supports that). If your main drive is encrypted you will need the recovery key so make sure you grab that first (google bitlocker recovery key).
You might say “you’re ignoring the idea that some people have a laptop” but honestly Linux itself kinda ignores that idea in a lot of cases. In that case you’d likely have to have windows shrink your main partition by ~50+100gb and then do a dual boot which is a little more annoying.
Yes two drives is much better than using the same drive to dual boot. However be aware that windows update will at some point break the Linux install even if installed on a second drive. There’s a few steps you can take to avoid this like making sure the boot partition and booy manager ate both on the Linux only drive but Microsoft messing something up is an inevitability.
If on a laptop with only one drive, you could boot to a USB drive or USB external enclosure for an SSD.
Ideally, you should back up all data to an external drive which is only plugged in during backups (unplug when installing another os). I would even recommend windows users booting into clonezilla and cloning their windows drive as it is really easy to overwrite or format the wrong drive.
It’ll depend on the laptop of course but I did this a few years back by putting a M.2 drive in a spare slot my laptop had.