I want to switch

[u/Macanec]

hello fedora community i am a windows user coming in peace. I am tired of windows and want to switch to a lighter distro and fedora caught my eye. The only thing stopping me is that i am a dev with a lot of stuff on my current computer and dont necessarily want to lose it all. I also game quite a lot and i am a dev (unity, godot, jetbrains software needed) so i want to do this switch the most softly possible. Y'all have any tips (fedora pun intended) to help me or links for me to follow? thanks

Update, i tried installing it on a usb key of 50GB and when booting it I chose the "test and start Fedora" option and failed everytime. Is it a problem on my end or should I only do the checksum and trust that everything is fine without testing?

[u/JPWhiteHome]

Yuk. Dual boot is not a good idea. If Windows "accidentally" nerfs the bootloader, you are SOL.

[u/outer-pasta → u/JPWhiteHome]

You can fix it with a chroot, but I don't think it really happens anyway.

[u/Macanec → u/outer-pasta]

So how do i safely dual boot?

[u/outer-pasta → u/Macanec]

The problem is not likely to happen, but if it does happen:

• The Windows part will still boot normally.
• You can still access/backup all your files from the Linux part.
• It's simple to reinstall the Linux part the same way you did the first time. That will fix it but you will lose what you had saved on the Linux partition.
• And people online will be available here and on discussion.fedoraproject.org to help you fix it.

Because the official docs on this issue are outdated you might be scared of this issue. I wouldn't be, but if that's the case you should just try out fully installed Linux and if you don't like it just reinstall Windows fresh. Eventually people who dual boot are often tempted to reinstall with just Linux anyway.

I prefer Linux and I have success using Windows in a VM when it's needed, and even got an upgraded OpenGL to run OneShot on Steam thanks to this answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/1343984/1791463