Installing Linux

Guide on how to prepare and Install Linux in general. Most of the guide here rewritten by Linkachus17

WARNINGS

I will assume that you:

• Have installed your Distro, as this guide will not cover on how to install your specific distro anyways

• Using GRUB as your bootloader

• Running UEFI mode

• Have Windows EFI partition (if you plan to dual boot with Windows)

STARTING OUT ON LINUX

Hello everyone, this is KyloNeko and I am here with a guide to help you get started on Linux! This is a guide that is intended to be a way for Vtubers to want to be able to move away from Windows (or Mac) or people who were not too keen on the Windows Recall feature. I hope this guide helps a lot of people out as it took me a while to switch over and get things worked out, but trust me it works out correctly as I have done a lot of testing on Linux with various applications that I daily drive.

If you need help finding a Linux distro that you intend to use long term or just wanted to try, you can use Distro Sea to help you figure this out.

Once you have selected your flavor of distro, download the distro and then you can then proceed to the next step.

Preparing your Installation media

Ok you made it this far after you selected your flavor of Linux, you can now grab a flash drive and then either use Balena Etcher, Rufus or Ventoy

Rufus only works on Windows, but Balena Etcher and Ventoy works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Rufus

Rufus will wipe your data inside your Flash Drive! so back up your data first before continuing!

• Download Rufus

• Open Rufus and then select your ISO

• Select your drive (It should select your Flash Drive automatically)

• Hit the START button

Rufus UI

Balena Etcher

Balena Etcher will wipe your data inside your Flash Drive! so back up your data first before continuing!

• Download Balena Etcher

• Open up Balena Etcher and then Select your .iso using one of three options

• Plug in your Flash drive, usually Balena Etcher automatically selects it for you. Otherwise select the correct Flash Drive

• Hit the Flash button and wait for it to finish flashing

Balena Etcher

Ventoy

Ventoy will wipe your data inside your Flash Drive! so back up your data first before continuing!

• Download Ventoy

• To use Ventoy, you can use web installer or native GUI installer. But in this guide, Ill be using GUI Installer instead

• If Ventoy doesn't automatically select your Flash Drive, use the drop down menu to select the correct Flash Drive

• Hit install button and wait for it to finish

Ventoy

• Once done, your Flash Drive will have 2 partition: VENTOYEFI (usually hidden) and Ventoy. Open Ventoy partition

• In Ventoy partition, drop your .iso file here

Ventoy folder where you drop your .iso files

Note for Ventoy: Since you can use Ventoy to boot multiple ISO's, when working with Linux ISO's, sometimes it doesn't work when booted in Normal mode. Instead try using grub2 mode when booting Linux ISO's from Ventoy

Ventoy boot options

Partitioning

Before installing Linux, it's recommended that you back up your personal files first somewhere else because Linux uses different filesystem (ext4) than Windows (NTFS).

While you can read NTFS drive(s) from Linux, you can't read ext4 drive(s) (at least by native) in Windows. And it is highly recommended that you don't use NTFS in Linux, unless it's for file transferring like a Flash Drive.

Simply because when working with NTFS, sometimes NTFS flags/marks your disk as dirty and you have to clean them. And there's a chance that cleaning them will actually delete some of your personal file, or corrupts your entire disk (speaking from my past experience), or even make your Linux unbootable if you plan to auto mount an NTFS partition (you still can fix it from the TTY, although a bit inconvenient since this is a beginner guide and not an advanced guide, so it's advised to not auto mount your NTFS partitions)

Once you done with your backups, we can continue on how to partition your drive for Linux usage

About disks in Linux

Linux uses /dev for their disks (sometimes devices too, like your Gamepads), so if you want to find your disks, just run sudo fdisk -l to show all disks

• If you're using HDD, chances are it's listed something like this: /dev/sda1

• I am not really sure about SATA SSD (chances are it's the same as HDD)

• But if it's NVMe, it should says something like this: /dev/nvme1n1p1 Your installer should tell you which disk is which

Example of CachyOS installer showing list of disks I have

No Dual-Boot

In case you want to fully move to Linux, and assuming you have made a backup of your personal files, you can simply choose the option that says along the line of: "Erase the whole disk"

Dual Boot (Windows and Linux)

WARNING! I will assume that your Windows OS has EFI partition, because we will be mounting that partition to Linux mount partition in order for GRUB to detect the boot entry so that you can boot your Windows OS from GRUB. But if you somehow don't have EFI partition for your Windows OS, there's a guide for that

In case that you still want to have your Windows OS, you have to select the option to "Manually partition my disk" (or along the line of that sentence) when installing your Distro Generally speaking, you want to have three partitions if you're using UEFI:

Partition name	Mount point	Description	Suggested size
root	/	This is where your personal files will be stored	Personal preference
swap	swap	This is a SWAP memory, useful for Sleep or Hibernation. Think of like Page file in Windows	Same as your RAM size
EFI	/boot/efi	This is where the boot files will be stored as well as the bootloader files	1GB

But if it's BIOS:

Partition name	Mount point	Description	Suggested size
root	/	This is where your personal files will be stored	Personal preference
swap	swap	This is a SWAP memory, useful for Sleep or Hibernation. Think of like Page file in Windows	Same as your RAM size

Source: Example Layouts

Next up is to configure your bootloader (assuming it's GRUB anyway) to detect your Windows install so that you can boot into it from your bootloader instead from your BIOS

• Once you installed your distro, open /etc/default/grub with text editor of your choice

• Uncomment GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false at the very end of the file by removing the #

• Open your terminal, type sudo fdisk -l and find out which disk and partition is your Windows EFI

Example for fdisk command output

• Once you figure that out, mount your Windows EFI by typing sudo mount /dev/your_disk /mnt and then run sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

• If the output says something along the line of "Found Windows Boot Manager on /dev/your_disk_here/efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi", then your Windows OS should be listed on your GRUB bootloader list

Example output of GRUB update for Dual Boot Windows and Linux