OpenSUSE and how to dual boot with Windows

Feels good to be back at exploring Linux distributions :D

I decided to try openSUSE but I no longer have a laptop for experiments and my humble Desktop is used for gaming (which means Windows, for compatibility sake), so…. dual boot :D

The more user friendly distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Manjaro (among others) made my life pretty easy in terms of partitioning things and making room for my brand new Linux distro (except Arch – never tried to dual boot that one, it was just easier to make it my sole OS), but I was having a few issues with openSUSE, even if they have a pretty intuitive GUI to help with everything about installation.

So, after a bit of googling, here’s the absolute noob guide for anyone to be able to dual boot when installing openSUSE:

1. Log into Windows first – find the Disk Management tool and shrink the drive you want to use for Linux – the amount you shrink is the space you’re gonna have for your chosen distro + swap + anything else that’s needed
2. Boot your openSUSE and it will automatically find the unused space you freed up – feel free to follow the recommended settings, no need to worry about anything else (for reference – they will default to a 500MB boot partition, 2GB swap partition and everything else will be a BTRFS partition for the operating system – my memory sucks so I used the values from this guide that was also what helped me)

October 25, 2021 | Categories: Linux | Tags: desktop, kde, Linux, openSUSE, tips | Leave a comment