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?
Put it in a VM, more flexible than dual boot. You can even just make a image of the partitions
cp /dev/nvmexx /path/to/part.imgand add it to the VM.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.
It seems the other answers already covered what you needed to know, so I won’t be redundant here. Pro tip: if you rarely use your Windows installation, you might consider moving it into a virtual machine that you can conveniently boot from within your running Linux system. This way you wouldn’t need the dual boot anymore, which might be desirable for various reasons.
If you are asking if not updating Windows will make your Mint system insecure, the answer is no. At least to me an exploit leveraging an unmounted Windows partition is unheard of. It will of course make your Windows system less secure for the 2% of the time you do use it. Another side effect of updating it is that it may break your dual booting.
Thanks for the answer. I was unsure whether it could be dangerous to the PC itself if you ignore the updates for both operating systems.
Yes, I’ve also read about problems with dual-boot systems after Windows updates, which is why I’ve refused to use Windows too often to make the updates worthwhile.
Yes, I’ve also read about problems with dual-boot systems after Windows updates, which is why I’ve refused to use Windows too often to make the updates worthwhile.
Sometimes Windows just overwrites GRUB (or whatever you use on your system) bootloader. But it’s relatively easy to fix using your distro’s installation media. Just in case this happens you need to refer to your distro’s documentation or community forums to fix it.
I do recommend however in the future to not put Windows and Linux on the same disk, but have 2, each for respective OS. That way, there’s no way Windows will ever touch your Linux bootloader, and you can still allow GRUB (or other bootloader) to chain-load Windows boot manager from the other disk.
