In the world of Linux, dual booting with Windows used to be de rigueur, but it has become less common in recent years. I used to dual boot all the time between Windows and Linux, when I first starting using Linux, but now I regard the Windows partition to be a waste of good space on my harddrive. About 15 years ago, I stopped bothering to keep a separate windows partition on my computers. When I recently decided to install a dual boot system on my laptop, I discovered to my surprise that dual booting between Ubuntu and Windows 10 has become a more difficult process than it used to be. In fact, installing Windows proved to be a far more painful ordeal than installing Linux, and setting up a dual boot system has become even more complicated. I think it is worth detailing my recent travails installing both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 24.04 on my laptop to illustrate the problems that can arise when trying to make Microsoft’s proprietary operating system share the same computer with a free operating system.

I first started using Linux back in 1999 with Mandrake 5.1. At the time I was writing 8051 microcontroller code in C for a living, so I didn’t anticipate that using Linux would be too difficult. Nonetheless, I still found it to be a challenge, because my Thinkpad i1412 laptop had a Lucent 1644 winmodem that lacked drivers for Linux, so I had to boot into Windows every time I needed to do an internet search to answer a technical question. Being able to dual boot between Windows and Linux was a lifesaver. I remember configuring the LILO (Linux Loader) to be able to display a menu at boot so I could select which operating system I wanted to use and configuring LILO to display my personal manifesto about computing freedom every time I booted up my laptop.