This is what I did, and it did its goal in making me comfortable using Linux. However, like what others suggest, live USB is probably much more easier honestly.
My preference is „bare metal” approach, then I really know if everything is working as it should, so I had a separate drive for Linux installation at the beginning and got to my other drives by just mounting them as NTFS.
But, finally I am at the point of no return for some time now, the old Windows drive is not even inside of my PC and the other drives are ext4 already.
For a quick check Live CDs/USBs are totally fine but not fully representative.
I use VBox to run my PiHole for now and have used it to play with a couple distros side by side. I also have a sup'd up tower built from spare parts from work, so resources aren't a constraint.
what partitions do linux distros need to function ?
Many guides will suggest setting up separate partitions for a bunch of different Linux directories. It's not strictly necessary to make things work properly. You can totally do it all on one partition (in addition to your windows one I mean). If you want to try something more fancy then keep a separate home partition, but honestly don't worry about it much unless a guide or installer is suggesting it.
is it bad idea to install linux on a single drive in its own partition ?
Nah. One big Linux partition isnt a bad thing and is a lot easier to grasp when starting out. (Though for dual boot you'll need the windows partition somewhere still)
what precautions should I take other than backing up my hard drive before doing dual boot ?
Backups are the main thing. Maybe a list of useful Windows software you have installed, just in case you accidentally break your install and can't boot in to check what you had installed.
Make Windows recovery media and a windows install disk if you don't have one. Just in case you need to go back and reinstall it can help avoid trying to do that without a working machine.
Test with a live usb first too. That way you can at least boot into the live Usb if things fail. And you will already have it prepared.
How can I ensure my dual boot linux install won't touch my windows partition at all if I install dual boot linux ?
I think you could mount your windows partition as read only if that's a concern. I don't expect any Linux distros to mess with anything though unless you're reckless about running install scripts.
Is there anything else I should be aware about ?
Linux guides vary between "here's a hack to just make it work" all the way to "here's a perfect Torvalds-Approved perfect bomb proof 100page configuration guide". Make sure you know what you're looking for first and don't get too caught up on making everything perfect. Focus on keeping good backups so you can restart from scratch if you ever need to. You'll probably end up trying a few Linux distros over the next few years anyway.
I like yadm - yet another dotfile manager. It uses a Git repository in the background, which you can sync with GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg or a selfhosted Git server like Forgejo.
This interests me. I may have to check this one out specifically for my configuration files. And I will definitely go the self hosting route if I do this. Thank you!
This - but I’d take it a step further and use a small-ish USB 3.2 SSD with Ventoy instead. That way, your live Linux experience isn’t kneecapped by having to load programs off a slow USB stick. In a pinch you can use a SATA SSD with a USB-SATA adapter too, that way you can cram a ton of ISOs on there and go to town.
There is ntfs support in the kernel, so there isn’t a distro that can’t touch windows partitions and in fact they have to at least link to them in order to install a dual boot bootloader. Just don’t mess with your windows partitions if you’re worried about it, but better option is to keep backups.
If you want to know how something works, ask and I’ll set it up and answer.
Just use the regular Ubuntu or a Fedora distro. These have the secure boot system in place to coexist with windows with zero headaches using a UEFI shim key signed by m$ through a 3rd party program m$ offers primary major distro packagers. These Twp options just work. Otherwise you must sign and replace your own keys for secure boot. There is good documentation available via PDF from the US government that goes into all the details of what to do and why at all different levels.
If you boot any distro that has a valid SB key and under secure boot UEFI will delete any unsigned bootable code as it is designed to do. This system works before init, so it is not a part of Linux or Windows. Neither of these OS's is at fault in almost any instance, despite people complaining regularly. They simply do not understand SB and UEFI. Do not follow some random tutorial on YT either. People say the dumbest things in this space, and there is a ton of misinformation. I can tell you quite a bit about it in depth. Worst case scenario, you can use a tool called Keytool to boot your computer directly into the UEFI system and manually change your keys of the hardware manufacturer did not do a full SB manual keys replacement implementation. Gentoo has some documentation on Keytool, but assumes a very high level of competency. The easy way, as mentioned, is simply to stick to any Fedora distro that uses the Anaconda pre-init system (all of them) or use Ubuntu.
I haven't tested Ubuntu's Nvidia driver implementation, but Fedora's is flawless so far over the last year I've been using it.
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