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by nickjj 2530 days ago
Dual booting is something I used to do. It's not a fun work flow.

Having to reboot (even with an SSD) is a very destructive action because it means suddenly all of your work is shut down and unless you script a way to rebuild your environment (which never works flawlessly even with a lot of effort), you'll have to set everything up again when you come back. So even if it only took 2 seconds to dual boot, you'd still have to deal with that tear down / set up process.

But, it's also not just gaming that keeps people on Windows. For example I do screencast recording and editing where I record software dev related videos but the tools I use only run on Windows, and they can't be run in a VM because the thing I want to record is my dev environment (I use WSL in Windows).

1 comments

You can hibernate both instead of cold reboot.
Yeah that's not a bad idea. It's still a big context switch to dual boot tho. Also dumping your entire machine's RAM to disk on an SSD seems questionable for the lifespan of your SSD. That's a huge amount of writes, especially if you're dual booting a few times a day. But maybe it wouldn't matter? I haven't measured how much of an impact that would have.

And in my case, it wouldn't work because I need to be able to record a Linux environment but record / edit videos in a Windows environment, so both OSs need to be running at once.

I think the SSD write cycle fears are overrated. I might be wrong. I've been doing it for years with extremely cheap Kingston SSD's. I also need to edit videos, not too often, hence I need windows. Switching takes like 6 seconds, most of the time from waiting for the grub menu. It might be worth to try out the workflow.