Those Steam Machines are just normal PCs. There should be no reason why you couldn’t dualboot windows to play those few games that do not work on Linux.
I have heard that Windows tends to ‘nuke’ the EFI boot partition if it’s shared with Linux. I’m not sure if it’s valid to have two EFI partitions on the same disk, but if the box can handle a second EFI boot partition, that would be a safer option.
There is also the issue that normal windows shutdown does not mean shutdown, but “hibernate”. In this state, touching any of the partitions the windows was previously using could corrupt them if mounted in Linux. (The same applies in reverse, and would be even more dangerous.) This doesn’t prevent dual-booting, but some care should be taken that the swiched-from-OS was actually shutdown.
If I recall that was a bug. Generally windows does not randomly start rewriting boot partitions unless maybe you put it into repair mode from the boot menu and you have both partitions on the same disk.
Note that you can disable the hibernate shutdown (called fast startup) in windows in the control panel. IIRC it’s in control panel > startup > fast startup.
Those Steam Machines are just normal PCs. There should be no reason why you couldn’t dualboot windows to play those few games that do not work on Linux.
The reason is, I don’t wanna.
There isn’t any game I want to play bad enough to install malware on my device.
I have heard that Windows tends to ‘nuke’ the EFI boot partition if it’s shared with Linux. I’m not sure if it’s valid to have two EFI partitions on the same disk, but if the box can handle a second EFI boot partition, that would be a safer option.
There is also the issue that normal windows shutdown does not mean shutdown, but “hibernate”. In this state, touching any of the partitions the windows was previously using could corrupt them if mounted in Linux. (The same applies in reverse, and would be even more dangerous.) This doesn’t prevent dual-booting, but some care should be taken that the swiched-from-OS was actually shutdown.
Windows is like the selfish little kid that won’t play well with others if they aren’t picked first.
If I recall that was a bug. Generally windows does not randomly start rewriting boot partitions unless maybe you put it into repair mode from the boot menu and you have both partitions on the same disk.
Note that you can disable the hibernate shutdown (called fast startup) in windows in the control panel. IIRC it’s in control panel > startup > fast startup.