Preface: For players who have both gaming and Linux environment requirements, dual booting seems to be the way to go; and the two hard drive slots in mainstream devices also provide support for dual boot installation. This article uses the installation of Revios+Garuda as an example to introduce the installation of dual boot systems.
What is Revios?
Revios is a streamlined and optimized Windows distribution (if you can call it that), which is characterized by disabling and deleting some system services to improve speed while ensuring stability; disabling a large number of privacy collection functions to protect privacy; disabling some functional components to reduce disk space usage. You can freely add back the components you need. There are also other distributions in the same ecosystem, such as AtlasOS, LTSC, etc., but Revios strikes a good balance between streamlining and functionality. If you have gaming requirements and also need to use professional software like Adobe, then this will be a good choice.
What is Garuda?
Garuda is a Linux distribution based on Arch, with a high-performance Zen kernel, a stunning desktop environment, and the ability to automatically create snapshots. It is more popular among other distributions (Endeavouros, Manjaro) (I'm sure). Because the author has used other distributions, this new system is used as an example.
Preparation:
- Our new partner ventoy: https://www.ventoy.net/cn/download.html
- Revios image: https://www.revi.cc/revios/download/
- Garuda image: https://garudalinux.org/downloads.html
- A host, here is my trashy shoebox host as an example:
Specific steps: mount the image with ventoy, install Revios, install Garuda, set the boot order.
I. Mount the image and install:
- We can see that this time we have two images to install. If we use Rufus, we need to write them separately twice. Therefore, it is recommended to use the ventoy tool here. Just drag the images into the disk, and you can deploy multiple images at the same time.
- Enter the BIOS and set the boot order, set the USB as the first option, save and exit;
- After restarting, you can see the following interface. We choose revios and start in normal mode:
You can see a classic Windows installation interface. We click "Agree" to the agreement:
Select the target disk for installation:
Then enter the settings:
Set up security questions:
- After restarting, enter the system, you can see that it runs very smoothly, even on this 2GB memory host:
The system comes with the Brave browser and a control center where you can adjust some parameters.
II. Install Garuda and boot
- Similarly, with ventoy, we choose garuda-normal boot. Note that we should start with the open-source driver first, otherwise there may be problems:
After running the code, enter the welcome interface and select "install garuda linux":
Set the language, region, and keyboard
Note that here we erase the entire disk, do not click on the wrong disk where Windows is located (or if there is only one disk, choose dual boot installation, which is risky). After setting up the encrypted system, you need to enter this password every time you start up, and then set to boot in GRUB mode:
After checking for correctness, start the installation:
- After the installation is complete, restart the computer. Note that you need to set the garuda disk as the first boot option. Then you can see the following interface, indicating that the boot is successful; here we use Grub to enter the Windows boot manager.
Postscript: It is not recommended to have a single disk dual boot, because there are problems with running two different file systems on a solid-state drive. It is also not recommended to have multiple partitions on a solid-state drive.