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Discussion on: Do You Dual-boot?

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Austin S. Hemmelgarn

Yes, I dual boot (Gentoo and Windows 10), because of gaming and the fact that I actually need bare-metal access to block devices for multiple things at work.

Barring that, I cans see it being advantageous to dual-boot for a couple of other reasons:

  • Windows does stupid things with file ownership and permissions. It's very easily possible to end up with files and folders that even the Administrator user can't touch, so it's useful to have a way to manipulate those files from outside of Windows.
  • On the flip side, there are some things Linux can't easily do. The UDF support is horrendous for example, and there are a lot of things other than just file data that' can't be touched on NTFS volumes by Linux, so it's useful to have Windows for dealing with such things.
  • Performance matters, and virtualization hurts it, even if you have hardware virtualization extensions. As a point of comparison, I've actually tested filesystem performance on the same system natively booted into Linux, running Linux in a VirtualBox VM with hardware virtualization, and running under WSL. The VM was about 120% slower than native with an otherwise identical filesystem stack, and WSL was almost 300% slower than native (though that's mostly because of Windows Defender).