I have heard that linux doesn’t play as nice with nvidia as others. So what type of graphics card is best for both linux and windows. And what other hardware considerations are there that I should consider when building my new PC? I machine is mainly for day to day stuff, web browsing, games, taxes…
So if they are on different disks, does that keep windows from eating the linux bootloader? Also, do you use something other than UEFI to manage which OS boots? Seems like a lot of people just use UEFI if things are on different disks.
If you install the Linux bootloader on the other drive with Linux, Windows basically just doesn’t know or care that the it exists to bother writing over it. You can use UEFI to choose what to boot, but GRUB works fine with entries across different drives.
That said, it’s not actually that hard to fix with a live USB if Windows does decide to eat GRUB on the same drive. I’ve been taking my chances on laptops particularly for years. So far, the only real problem I’ve run into was doing something stupid while dead tired and managing to nuke the Windows bootloader all on my own–somewhat ironically, while I was setting up another Linux distro to boot off a new drive! Which was also totally fixable, but a bigger pain than reinstalling GRUB would have been. (Especially with not being nearly as comfortable dealing with Windows stuff.)
My understanding of what happens when using separate drives is that one drive is given priority in the BIOS/UEFI menu and then people just use the device menu when using the secondary drive. Windows really only cares about its own drive with this setup, so the bootloader on the other drive is safe. I’ve never actually done this myself since the only system I dual boot on is my laptop and it only has one drive installed. To answer your second question, I just use my bootloader (GRUB in my case) to select which OS I boot into.
No that doesn’t keep windows from changing anything.
Just learn how to repair your bootloader how your distribution wants it done and you’ll be fine.
I’m guessing boot to a USB and run some kind of repair utility?
Some distributions have that. Some have it built into the tools like arch. For some you just boot your installation media and run only the “install bootloader” step.
About the only universal way is to boot usb, pivot-root or chroot to switch to the installed system you wanna run and do grub-install, although you need to understand a few things about your system to not make errors.
Once you pick something to stick with, go ahead and look up its process. Think of it like practicing changing a tire in the grocery store parking lot before you actually need to do it on the side of the road.