Hey y’all
I’m taking a college course which is hell bent that its students use Windows 11. Currently my laptop is still using Windows 10 and if there is no bloatware/AI free way to install Windows 11, I’m just going to bite the bullet and install it the regular way. So if anyone knows of a relatively bloatware free way of installing Windows 11, please let me know.
p.s. For those who would encourage me to use Linux. For my desktop I already use Linux Mint.
That anti cheat software usually is worse spyware than what even Microsoft can dream up for windows 11. so i would use a „burner device“ for that anyways that will be formatted after the exams. No way I would let any of them access my personal data.
To build on this answer, maybe it’s possible to install and boot win11 from a removable drive?
Theoretically, but it would probably be slower than dogshit if you tried to do it over e.g. USB, and the administration would probably also not be pleased with you spending the entire exam with an external storage device conspicuously bunged into your computer.
You could grab a cheap (relatively, these days) low-ish capacity SSD in whatever flavor your machine takes and install Windows on that with your primary drive removed and safely stored away somewhere, though, and then just swap them back when you’re done.
If you want something to do with your secondary SSD afterwards there are enclosures you can get that’ll convert an NVME SSD into a super fast USB flash drive sort of arrangement, albeit typically dangling on the end of a short cable rather than sticking directly into the port, which makes a good modern day stand-in for those portable laptop hard drive enclosures nerds used to carry around in the early 2000s.
Could you not create a separate partition on the internal drive for Windows 11 and boot from that? That’s how I would do it for MacOS or Linux installs.
You can, but on the same drive they will share the same bootloader. While Windows officially can share its EFI partition, be aware that updates may rewrite it, and might not bring your other install along. This is fixable, but still very annoying if you have some expertise on Windows boot setup commands.
This is why I always to prefer to setup multiboot systems on separate drives with their own EFI partition, and always use the non-M$ install for the boot menu.
I’ve never had trouble with UEFI. I keep people commenting about it, so I believe it happens, I just never experienced it.
I’ve admittedly got a lot of selection bias, since people don’t tend to bring me their computer when it’s working correctly. I’m sure it usually works fine. Still, the only times I’ve seen a multiboot system suddenly fail, it was Windows’s fault.
its not really an UEFI issue but a windows one. unlike BIOS systems, UEFI was made capable to handle this, yet windows fucks it up.
it also depends on your configuration. on an ESP partition there’s a default bootloader, and per-os bootloaders in directories. if you rely on using the default bootloader, windows will overwrite that from time to time, but it can fuck up the per-os bootloader setup too if it fucks with the list that the efibootmgr command manages on linux. I don’t know whether it does the latter
I understand the issue just fine, just never experienced it. And I’ve dual booted plenty. I just wish I knew why so I could help other people not to go through it.