I’m thinking of getting married but I love two women. If I dual boot, say Sunday to Tuesday with 1 partner then Wednesday to Saturday with the other, I’m sure I can at some point work out which one I keep. Or perhaps I can just dual boot them both forever. What do you think?
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Mint is the top rated distro for a reason, but for someone that only speaks XP or Win7, its a good windows replacement, especially with Wine pre installed and the look and feel choices available. Cinnamon is available for other distros and can make almost anything feel like windows even Ubuntu, so how far you wander from the base is still your choice.
Thank goodness someone has a sense of humour. Be aware though that dual booting can result in problems which don’t happen with two boxes.
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No that means two mother in laws and two telling you “you know” 
when you don’t 
It does depend however, on whether you are going to dual boot with Windows or use VM ware. Windows is fussy about it’s startup files and you have to be careful. If I remember rightly when I dual booted, I had to Install Windows first, and then Linux. If you do it the other way round, Windows deletes the Grub files… 
Looks like you need VirtualBox reality. Then you can have both at the same time
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A little late for a response, but the discussion isn’t closed. My fallback plan to get back to windows is a free and excellent backup program call Reflect by Macrium. I kept my data files separate from the Win 10 boot partition. I can backup the Win 10 partition into a 17 gig file. The standalone program takes less the 1 gig. I place the Reflect boot program on a USB drive. I backup windows into it’s own recovery partition and that’s it. No matter often I need to, I can restore Windows back to the hard drive. On a 32 gig USB, I can place the boot program & the Win backup on the same drive.
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Never too late for additional information that will help the community.
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OK Guys,
I am taking the plunge! Well, with dual-boot for awhile.
Laptop Lenovo X220 Linux Mint 18.3
Desktop HP 8300 Linux Mint 19.1 
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i still have my dual windows boot hdd in a drawer that i kept “just in case”. no harm in keeping something around that is familiar. everything i have read about mint suggests that it will be a smooth transition. i keep meaning to put that on an empty partition one day to have a look-see 
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Awesome! Have fun.
Just curious, why 18.3 instead of 19.1 on the laptop?
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I will have to blame the Laptop for not installing 19.1. The Lenovo X220 is a PC - tablet. Being part tablet, it has a touch screen that can be use with a special pen. I chose Mint 18.3 figuring that since it has been out for awhile that most problems I would come across should be solved.
When I booted Mint 18, the cursor was jumping all over the screen. I could only stop the jumping by touching the screen with the pen. Touching the screen with a pen with one hand and then trying to type with the other hand. Not good. 
I found a temp fix of the jumping cursor on the web. ‘xinput’, then ‘xinput disable 11’. But every time I boot Linux, I had to perform the temp fix.
Again, hunting the web and changing how I asked the question, I found a permanent way to stop the jumping cursor. 
Long story but, when I loaded Mint 19.1 on to the laptop, I had the jumping cursor again. The fix for 18.3 did not work for 19.1. I did a quick search for a fix for Mint 19 and did not find one. So, I went back to Mint 18.3
The desktop has a regular monitor so Mint 18.3 or 19.1 worked on it just fine. I may even load a couple other Linux distro on the desktop to see how they run.
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Saying “Good-bye” to Windows.
OK, I ready to switch to Linux full time. I’m sure many of you have may the switch from Windows 7, 8 or 10 to a Linux distro. My question is: What did you find out that you needed to change? -and/or- Why did you keep a copy of Windows if you did?
So far I found out that;
Apple i-tune and Apple Cloud does not seen to work with Linux.
Windows can not read Linux ext formatted disks.
I might want to keep a Fat32 disk to pass files back & forth to Windows.
I should (?) reformat NTFS disks to Fats32, ex3, or ex4?
Linux can not scan / repair a NTFS disk.
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I’ll look in my notes that I made at the time I switched to see if I can come up with some answers for you on this - if not I am pretty sure I read something from @abhishek on this at the time which was easy to understand
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There is a software called Linux Reader which will allow you to read Ubuntu drives inside Windows 10.
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When you say you may want to keep a disk to pass files between Linux and Windows, is this in the context of a dual boot machine, or are they different computers in a network?
If the context is a dual boot, then you can keep using NTFS for this shared drive (nearly all Linux distros ship with the ntfs-3g package which you need to be able to read and write to NTFS partitions). If you go down this route, it’s probably best to use Windows for any maintenance activity on the NTFS partitions.
For the Linux partition(s), I’ve always used ext4 (though other, more modern, alternatives like btrfs and zfs will work as well). There shouldn’t be any real need for older formats like FAT32. At the risk of stating the obvious, I assume you appreciate that reformatting the disks will destroy any data on them (so make sure you have everything you’re going to need backed up first).
There used to be some Windows software for reading ext3 partitions, but I don’t know whether it has been maintained. For my part, I’ve never seen any good reason for accessing Linux partitions from Windows - it just seems to add risk.
My journey to Linux started with dual booting, something I still do, which gave me the comfort of knowing that I had the option of running Windows software if I couldn’t find suitable Linux alternatives. I’m gradually finding that I use Windows less and less, but there are a couple of small things that cause me to keep it around: I haven’t found a Linux disc authoring program which supports 25Gb BluRay discs - I’m referring to the process of composition here, not burning (xfburn handles that bit fine), and I also have some significant Excel workbooks with macros written in VBA which I haven’t got around to converting yet.
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two years later i still have my old win10/bodhi linux dual boot hdd sitting in a drawer. i kept it at first “just in case”, but don’t recall ever really needing to boot back into it except when trying to help someone troubleshoot a windows problem.
i needed to change over to libreoffice, but luckily vlc (for playing dvd’s), firefox and handbrake (for transcoding dvd’s) were all os independent and available on linux. in general my favorite change is using the command line more and being more comfortable with it. i appreciate having that kind of familiarity and access to my system
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looks like itunes is not much longer for this world. not that the replacements are likely to be any more linux-friendly, but i thought i would share that since i ran across it earlier.
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My lesson: never say never. More than 6 months passed without starting up Windows.
I still had it as a dualboot option. As my SSD died, and had to replace it, I omitted the Windows install.
Instead, used those GB’s as my home folder 
I have now Windows only as a Virtualbox guest…
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When I first started in with Ubuntu (about three years ago now), I had a separate notebook with Win 7. As I got more comfortable with Ubuntu, I used Win 7 less. Having two machines was a great way to wean myself off Win 7.
Your question bears repeating – what kept you tied to Windows?
a. With Ubuntu 16.04, I had hardware issues, such that the webcam may suddenly be undiscoverable by Chrome. THat problem vanished with 18.04.
b. For podcasts, I was totally in love with a suite called DownloadStudio, and WINE did not display things correctly. Finally, I searched a tad more and found a newly improved podcast client called GPodder that, although not as good as DS, works good enough.
c. I was doing a lot of proofreading of PhD papers from Thailand. LibreOffice seriously messed up formatting of papers sent to me as a DOCX document. On this very forum, the name WPS was offered, and it solves THAT problem.
That leaves only one thing I still use Windows for – surface tests of audio CDs. I use Nero DiskSpeed, and hours of trying stuff out fails to find anything remotely like it.
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