this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
23 points (96.0% liked)

Linux

53521 readers
1807 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Hey guys,

I use my laptop with a Windows 11 / Linux Mint dual-boot system.

Since I actually use Linux Mint 98% of the time, I wanted to ask if it is still necessary to do the system and security updates for Windows 11 as long as Windows is not needed?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] chaosCruiser 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

What about those 2% days when you do need windows? Every time you boot to it, you’ll have gigabytes of updates waiting for you, which is seriously annoying. In order to do “just one thing real quick”, you’ll end up wasting an hour each time. I propose you make those days less infuriating, by booting up windows a bit more frequently.

Ideally, you would just uninstall it entirely, and use the disk space for Linux. Unfortunately, many people still have some ties that are difficult to break, so I totally get it why dual booting exists. If that one thing you do in windows doesn’t require much performance, you could also dedicate some old heap of junk laptop for it.

[–] Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

Or just ditch the Windows partition/drive and use a VM instead.

[–] chaosCruiser 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

Really depends on how you intend to use Windows. Once upon a time I thought that was a great solution for communicating with an ancient piece of windows specific hardware. Turns out, you really need to keep that old W98 computer around unless you are willing to upgrade to new analysis hardware that costs about as much as a nice car. Home users probably never run into issues like this.