100% agree. The windows fanbois always come out in force and defend Microsoft, they act like the abused in bad marriages defending their dirtbag husband who beats them /shrug

It’s not a problem with my computer. I didn’t do anything “wrong”. I clean installed win 11 on its own hard drive because 1) I own a retail copy and 2) my daughter is taking the lsat test and it requires windows or macOS. The install took hours. And the part that slowed it down was the update process. Ok no big deal, it’s a new install, i mean fedora fresh installs in like 15 minutes (and most of that is me clicking buttons), but whatever. So that’s it, it’s just a clean install of win11. Every month or so, I boot it up and hit the update button. It’s painful, every time. Yes I get it’s designed to slow roll in the background but come on - if I open up settings -> windows update and hit the update now button - then get to work already. It’s always a 20+ minute process. This last one was exceptionally long, but you get my point.

And these updates are always terrible, stuff breaks right away. After the last update the lock screen was all Asian characters. The rest of the OS was fine, just the lock screen changed. Dafuq? The recycle bin contents were all like hash file names. A year or two ago an update on my wife’s laptop wouldn’t proceed because the recovery partition that win11 itself created during install was too small. All other further updates wouldn’t go either because that one was stuck. Like grandma is going to resize partitions - granny’s computer is heading towards bot ville.

Anyways ya, windows sucks big hairy donkey balls now. 50% of that suckage comes from windows update. The other 50% comes from them shoving poo in your face every chance it gets.

Definitely true when learning Linux, but to be fair, things do break on their own. Example: just yesterday I updated fedora and it broke my network connections for my vms. I certainly didn’t do that, and it seems to be a repeating issue.

But you wanna know what the difference is?

1. A 30 second web search identified the problem and a quick edit of the network.conf text file fixed the issue.
2. even if I couldn’t fix it, I could very easily roll the updates back
3. this issue will get fixed for good and won’t still be lingering around for 10 years

Compare that to me updating win11 on a faster more capable computer a couple weeks ago:

1. It broke like a bazillion things, well documented on the internet, no solutions other than “we’ll maybe fix that someday”
2. the computer rebooted THREE times! 3! I’ve seen two-three was a new one
3. it took 40 minutes on a 32 core threadripper, 64gb ram, plenty of free hard drive space, and a 4090 card. No, it wasn’t years of updates, and it wasn’t a major version update. It was maybe 1.5 months since last update.

Linux is great, not perfect, but great with great communities.

I’m not sure why my prior comment is getting downvoted, people are weird on the internet. I was confused because you need some level of expertise to install Linux or any operating system for that matter - ie it’s not something my grandma or my parents can do… your questions seem overly cautious (probably not a bad thing)

I think you’re fine based on what you say you’re comfortable with. You totally can install windows right on your existing drive, but people have been having issues doing that (no fault of their own). First, you’d have to shrink your Linux partitions - this is a little tricker than just straight up nuking a drive and repartitioning. Many Linux installers can do this for you on a drive running windows, I don’t believe the windows installer can do it the other way around (at least not with a pretty gui that’s right in your face when installing windows). So you’d kind of be doing it backwards - usually you’d install windows and then let linux fix it all up nice nice. The other problem is that people don’t trust Microsoft software to do this these days. There’s been issues with windows taking over the boot partitions and making the Linux partition unbootable. This is why so many people recommend dual physical drives when dual booting - windows does its thing “over there” and Linux does its thing “over here”. Worst case it’s malicious, best case, the errors in the past have been Microsoft incompetence.

First choice? Get the game working in Linux - but it sounds like that’s just not going to be an option and you’ve researched that.

2nd choice: I’d use two drives, one with windows and one with Linux. Also the most expensive and if the only thing you do on the windows drive is play that one game - kind of a huge waste of a resource. But easiest least risky setup from both a “oops I screwed up the install” and a “windows is playing nice in the sandbox”

3rd choice? Dual boot off a single hard drive. If I were doing it, I’d probably nuke the whole drive after a backup, and make all the final partitions. Then I’d install windows and make sure it landed where it was supposed to. Then I’d install Linux.

Last choice? I’d try to resize the existing partitions and install Linux. I would definitely find a guide for that and follow it, (sorry I don’t know of one to recommend but I’m sure there’s plenty of good ones). My guess is you’ll end up back at 3rd choice ;)

And I’ll reiterate my prior point - good time for a solid backup! :)

Good luck! You’ll be fine :)

There’s no such thing? You’ll have to install windows just like you installed Linux. I’m confused how you got Linux on your machine yet you’re asking this question-did someone else install it for you? If so, best to not mess around with repartitioning your drive. High likelihood of you screwing up your boot partition. Best to jam in another hard drive, unplug your Linux drive and go to town. Or heck, do what you want and learn :) breaking things is the best way to learn…

Just please back up all your files before you go crazy. You can’t permanently damage or break anything on your computer, but you CAN permanently delete files you cared about :)