so i have a new pre-built 13" with a local account win11 pro that i intend to dual boot with Mint or Zorin. I’ve read that Win 11 doesn’t play nicely sometimes…
so for long-term data safety…
should i have 3 partitions on the hard drive - Win11, Linux and documents.
or 2 partitions - Win11 and documents - with a 250GB expansion card with linux on it?
i assume that either makes sense or it’s irrelevant to the Win11 issues…
Not personally dual-booted in quite some time but I believe the primary issue is that Windows updates can sometimes overwrite your custom bootloader entries… meaning that you’ll need to boot from a rescue USB stick in order to reinstall your chosen bootloader and re-enable linux booting.
Given that most linux distros are ok to read and write to NTFS partitions (though, again, not something I do so citation-needed I guess) I’m not sure that an extra partition for your documents is warranted? Unless you run some programs that will struggle with file permissions on a non-native filesystem (aka, I believe the Steam linux client doesn’t like using NTFS for storing games).
For data safety I would not make a shared NTFS “documents” partition the only copy of important stuff. Windows fast startup/hibernation and Linux NTFS writes can make troubleshooting annoying, so if you want shared files, keep it simple and also keep a real backup. For the Linux install, I’d usually shrink Windows, leave the EFI partition alone, disable Fast Startup, suspend BitLocker/device encryption if it is enabled, then install Mint/Zorin beside Windows. Running Linux from an expansion card is fine for testing, but for a daily setup it is easier to lose/unplug and slower than the internal SSD.