Keeping Windows while you learn Mint is the lowest-risk way to switch - your old system stays one reboot away. Dual boots fail for boring, preventable reasons, and this guide removes each one before the installer starts.
A dual boot is two systems sharing one disk politely - and politeness here is preparation. Shrink from Windows, disable Fast Startup, protect yourself with the BitLocker key, and the install itself becomes the easy part.
Do not let the Linux installer be the first tool to touch your Windows partition if you can avoid it. Boot Windows, open Disk Management, right-click the C drive and choose Shrink Volume. Free up at least 40 GB for a comfortable Mint - more if you plan to keep files and apps on the Linux side.
If Windows refuses to shrink as much as the free space suggests, it is usually unmovable system files (hibernation or page file) sitting in the way. Disabling hibernation temporarily and rebooting usually frees the shrink. Do not force it with third-party tools on a machine whose data matters - a smaller Mint partition is a fine compromise.
Windows Fast Startup does not really shut the PC down - it hibernates the system session. A hibernated Windows partition is a locked partition: Linux may refuse to mount it, and changes made around it can corrupt it.
While you are in Windows, also save your BitLocker recovery key somewhere outside the PC if your drive is encrypted - adding a boot entry can trigger a recovery prompt on some machines, and the key turns that from a crisis into a formality.
Boot the Mint USB, run the installer, and at the installation type screen choose Install Linux Mint alongside Windows. The installer uses the space you freed and sets up GRUB, a boot menu that appears at every start: pick Mint or Windows, ten seconds of patience boots the default.
One classic dual-boot quirk to expect: after using Linux, the Windows clock may show the wrong time, because the two systems read the hardware clock differently. The one-line fix, run once in Mint, tells Linux to match the Windows convention:
timedatectl set-local-rtc 1 --adjust-system-clock
The video shows the alongside option on the real installer screen - watch it before you do your own, and the menu will already be familiar.
▶️ Watch Full VideoGRUB defaults to Mint after an alongside install. If you mostly live in Windows while learning, you can change the default and the wait time later with a small settings edit. Most switchers find their default quietly flips within a month - leave it alone until yours does.
Rarely these days. A Windows feature update can occasionally restore its own boot entry to the top of the list, which looks like Mint vanished - it has not; the BIOS boot order or GRUB just needs re-selecting. Your Mint partition and files are not touched by Windows updates.
Mint reads and writes Windows NTFS partitions happily, which makes sharing documents easy. Windows cannot read Mint's ext4 partitions without extra tools - the practical pattern is to keep shared files on the Windows side or in a shared data partition.