Hello,
I’m quite new to the idea of dual-booting, and I have a new Lenovo Legion Slim 7 which I would like to dual-boot on.
I definitely know that Thinkpads have better Linux compatibility, but Thinkpads would not meet my main use case for this laptop (hence my choice). It’s also got an Nvidia GTX 4060 in it, which will probably not be optimal from what I hear (so any tips on that are much appreciated as well!). At least it has an AMD Ryzen.
That being said, I would love to use Fedora Silverblue / Kinoite alongside Windows. I know the docs say it will come with some difficulties, but I am willing to give it a crack given some of the latest comments on the issue tracker (https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/284#issuecomment-1869828571).
How would I go about actually shrinking Windows 11 down to make space for Fedora? Is “partitioning” the right word to use here?
It seems there are a million tools out there for this, but I would like to try to avoid extra tools for it unless there is a really reputable and easy-to-use one (just to avoid bloat).
After I shrink the partition, is it then just a matter of running the installer and using automatic partitioning with the unused space left over after shrinking Windows?
I’m a developer, but honestly the simpler you can explain this process, the better (I’m a web developer with very little experience dual-booting anything at all and have no clue how this process should go down).
Thank you!
Edit: I’d also love to know what kind of issues the docs are actually warning about as far as dual-booting. Will Windows wipe the bootloader on update or will Silverblue / Kinoite wipe Windows out somehow? If it’s Silverblue wiping Windows out, that may cause me to go with a different distro - but if Windows wipes Silverblue, it’ll be annoying but not a deal breaker (I plan to use Silverblue / Kinoite for development exclusively, so everything will be on GitHub).
After you shrink the main partition to the desired size, make sure you have enough space for the second os. Afterwards, run the installer for the distro you selected and most of the time, it will detect that you also have windows and will let you install on the largest piece of availiable drive space (your leftover space after ypu shrank the partition). Then the partitioner will create the new partitions (the root and swap and maybe a home partition if you want it seperate from the root one). The bootloader will be installed in the first partition where the windows bootloader is. It won’t replace it but it will be on the same folder with it. Your efi configuration will get configured (as per with all os installations) to lookup the bootloader of the os. In this case it will look for grubx64.efi if i am not mistaken. When you remove linux if you decide to in the future, you have to mount that boot partition (commonly called ESP) and delete grub so that your computer boots from the windows bootloader or some other os bootloader.
Edit: tl;dr: Just go with the installation and choose the alongside option, or better, the “use the largest space availiable” option when partitioning.