It's called duel boot when grub and the Windows bootloader keep overwriting each other.
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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More like boot duel
(this fight has been brought to you by UEFI)
Genuinely curious, why does that happen?
I've been dual booting Windows with Kubuntu for 7 years now, when I switched laptops I just pulled out the SSD from old laptop and shoved into the new one (I do NOT recommend this though if you don't feel comfortable fixing all kinds of weird issues in Windows lol) so I always used the same dualboot installations. I have not had a single time when Windows bootloader would overwrite my grub and cause problem, the worst ever happened was that boot order got changed after a couple of major Windows updates so Windows bootloader was loaded on boot instead of grub, and I could always just change the boot order back in BIOS and everything is back to normal.
I do use grub-customizer although it's not exactly a good idea these days since it's not exactly well maintained, perhaps that might have helped since it's customizes grub configs in nonstandard ways?
It used to be more common. Back in the day, Windows frequently overwrote Grub "accidentally", most likely because they wanted to make using Linux painful. That was back when Ballmer called Open Source cancer.
Meanwhile Microsoft has softened their stance on Linux and Open Source, and they made it much less of an issue.
This article explains why. It's not an issue that affects all motherboards.
https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Force_grub-efi_installation_to_the_removable_media_path
Who won?
Duel boot is what you call it when Windows is the other OS
I just call that "a virus in a different partition". LOL
The boot manager does a coin flip each time to choose which one to use
Thats not a duel! Weaponise them and let them battle it out. The winner gets the boot! (Pun!!)
Who's next?
EPIC RAP BATTLES OF HISTORYYYYYYYY
Ooooowonoooo
Verbus.
Fehoooora!
Obviously the duel wielding rouge
On a serious note, o/ welcome to the club! :)
en garde
I would also like to know who wins this duel.
good on you, NVIDIA drivers are very decent these days, on wayland in particular. Glad to see someone rocking an Xeon chip, they are great chips.
And I just learned that CachyOS is based on Arch! I just began dual booting fedora (nobara) with arch, but went with river as the wayland compositor, because I heard good things. KDE is a great DE, keep learning linux, it's a lot of fun!
It's an arch installer that has its own set of optimized kernels id you want them, but also has a great kernel manager so you can pick different optimized ones or defaults or even hardened options. Plus it does BTRFS w/ snapshots set up for you, which helps deal with the Arch ecosystem's rate of updating
yeah CachyOS is a fantastic introduction to Arch. It's by far my favourite distro and I recommend it for new users. If I don't feel like doing an arch install, I just install CachyOS. always have an up to date ISO of it on my ventoy.
Immediate recommendation with KDE: your Windows key and the ~ key pressed together will bring up the ability to set snapping zones for windows. Very helpful tool, especially if you were a fan of "FancyZones" in Windows
Very important to enable wobbly windows as well.
I don't know if the key bind changed, but it's meta (windows key) + t, now. I only know because I read a very recent article from KDE about how the latest plasma -I'm on 6.4.3- tweaked it to be better.
I really like it, it has the option to create window gaps similar to how i3-gaps is.
Then hold the shift key when dragging a window to make it snap.
yeah it's meta+t for me too.
is there a way to snap a window so it occupies 2 zones? i have a vertical monitor divided into thirds and sometimes i want a window to be 2 thirds tall :p
You can delete a zone and then an adjacent one takes up the space. Then click and drag the area between the now 2 zones to resize.
I think they're unique to virtual environments too, now. So maybe make a virtual environment for when you want it 2 zones tall. Idk how to do that though, as I have never messed around with virtual environments.
If you’re gaming download Steam and read into Proton. Proton is Steam’s compatibility layer for Windows Games, it allows them to run on Linux.
https://protondb.com/ will be your best friend.
Was hoping to see a duel here somewhere...
The battle was epic
Have fun with CachyOS! It's what I'm using as my daily driver right now. Protip for BTRFS: learn how to rollback to a previous snapshot before you need to. It makes it a lot less stressful.
welcome to freedom and enjoy the ride! lots to learn!
Oooh I just started using Cachy, I love it!
I thought Arch was going to be a lot more daunting, but I already used the command line for a lot of stuff in my previous, Ubuntu-based distro. Make sure to set up Timeshift in case anything breaks though ;)
(Oh and check out the Windows 7 theme that KDE Plasma offers. It's byoutiful.)