I've been happily Windows-free for about 5 years, but lately I need some Win-only software including a few games that don't work at all on Linux. My main questions:
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How to avoid Windows messing with my Linux install? Having a separate PC is not possible for me right now. I'm considering uninstalling grub and instead selecting the boot device I want from UEFI, idk if this is advisable though.
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I'm also interested in how to get a Windows install that's as minimal as possible: I don't want to log in to a Microsoft account, I don't want telemetry etc, I only want whatever is strictly required to make my system functional. The one thing I do want is Windows Defender cause ain't no way I'm dealing with an antivirus.
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Should I go for Win 11 or stick to 10?
Any tips or experiences are welcome!
Ps: I know this information is probably all out there, but I thought a post in this community about it would be useful for others as well.
UPDATE: I ended up going with a regular old dual boot using Windows 10 iot LTSC - there's a few games I wanted to run and a driver as well so I chose to install directly on hardware as opposed to a VM. I created the install media using Ventoy, and UNPLUGGED EVERY OTHER DRIVE during installation except the one Windows was supposed to come on. Afterwards I had to boot in with a live Linux USB (the nice thing about Ventoy is that you can write multiple ISOs to your USB so it came in handy) to manually install rEFInd onto the original EFI partition that my Linux install uses, then I just had to set up the correct boot order in UEFI and everything is working. I also had to fuck around on the boot partition and with efibootmgr to remove all traces of grub so things don't get tangled up which was a bit scary but things are working perfectly now.
Is there a reason you need a dual book instance instead of a VM or even WINE?
Unless you need direct access to hardware and if you have enough RAM, you can probably avoid dual booting altogether.
I exhausted the WINE route, some games I want to play don't work with Proton no matter how much you tweak (the first time I'm running into this in a few years) as well as some additional software. There's also a driver I need to run that's technically available on Linux but it's a reverse engineered solution developed by one guy so who knows if it's gonna keep working.
If that scares you, don't look too far behind the curtain on any open source project.
Fair point, xkcd was right https://xkcd.com/2347/
All my machines are running a distro maintained since 1993 by one guy who's slowly running out of money.
But the beauty of open source is: If there's demand for something, other devs will pick up the project, or develop a replacement.