Dual boot with Windows / Silverblue and encryption?

Privacy Questions
1

Hi all,

I have to keep Windows on my laptop for some work-related tasks, but would like to dual boot with Fedora Silverblue.

Anyone know if it’s possible to set that up so that I have full-disk encryption with LUKS?

Thanks in advance!

2

I would highly recommend using two separate drives for each OS.

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3

So I would put Windows on my laptop drive and install Silverblue to an external hard drive? Is that how you’d go about it?

I just don’t like the idea of having to connect an external drive every time I want to use Linux.

4

You could insert an additional SSD into your laptop if it has a secondary M.2 slot.

Also, what are those “work-related tasks”? Maybe you could just use Silverblue and run W11 in a VM.

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5

I do audio production on the side, and need Windows to run certain plugins.

I’ve used Ubuntu Studio, and I can get most Windows plugins to run using Yabridge. But there are some that just don’t work. For instance, no Izotope plugins work, because wine doesn’t have crypt32 or something. It’s just too many headaches.

I need it to just work. And I don’t think using a VM would be fast enough.

6

You can get near native performance using QEMU.

Do you know if your laptop has a secondary M.2 slot?

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7

I’m not sure if it has a secondary slot. I’ll check.

Didn’t know about QEMU. I’ll check it out. Thanks!

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8

The setup I’ve done is to install Windows first, shrink it/make sure I have free space for the Silverblue install.

Then I create a 500MB-1GB partition on Windows before booting the Silverblue install media. I used the custom partitioning to automatically create the silverblue partitions with the empty space before deleting the boot/efi partition (it should have auto mounted the Windows one) and formatting that new 500M-1GB partition I made as the EFI partition

So overall in your system, you get “two” EFI partitions. The one Windows originally comes with and the 500MB-1GB one you give to Fedora. Only the Fedora one is actually used though, which is fine because Fedora should automatically add the Windows entry as a GRUB option anyway.

That method was mentioned here too

I’ve heard that the two EFI partitions thing may not play well with badly written BIOSs/UEFIs, so ymmv. For what it’s worth, I’ve used it on my dell with little issues.

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9

I did the similar - installed Windows, shrank the partition to make space for Linux, applied Bitlocker, installed Silverblue with a second EFI partition - works a charm. Only had to enter the recovery key for Bitlocker on the first post-linux-install Windows boot, after that it works no problem.

10

How come? Why not dual boot on same drive?