I want to make the switch but I want to test run first before fully committing. My PC has an M.2 SSD. I was thinking I could buy another one, swap them out and put Linux on that. In an emergency, I can swap the SSD back. Does this seem like a viable/sensible path toward Linux? I don’t really have too many files on my PC that I care about. I don’t want to dual boot. I did that on a laptop back in the day and it was annoying.
Yeah that’s a very good way to do it. No risk of accidentally picking the wrong drive or anything.
If you’ve got two slots and a modern motherboard, you can do the same thing but keep both m.2 devices installed. If you really want to be sure, take out the windows device, install Linux on the second, and then put the windows device back in. You’ll be able to swap back to windows if needed that way without swapping things out
Why would I need to remove the Windows SSD if adding a second? Just to make sure I don’t accidentally overwrite it during install? Is there some other risk I’m not thinking of?
Yeah just in case you overwrite the wrong one during setup.
Most installers don’t try to do too many weird things for boot purposes anymore in the EFI age. Just hit F12 on startup and pick the other option. Or configure grub afterwards to have the windows boot option.
It means you won’t end up with dual boot breaking one of your installs, you won’t accidentally overwrite anything etc.
Entirely optional, but if you were already planning on removing it anyway, it’s not really any extra work
Did that too. I even installed a hot swap for my drives. Worked like a charm.
This is exactly what I did. Later I copied my old system to a VM and I boot it up inside Linux when needed.
I would highly recommend this as I did something similar. I ran Linux on an older machine separate from my main machine. I did so for about 10 months. Plus I built out a gaming machine for somebody and set up another old machine as a media center, both with Linux.
I finally made the 100% switch just a few months ago. I bought a new M.2 drive and swapped out just like you are planning. I really needed to make sure I had no hitches for work purposes. I haven’t even considered swapping back (though in full transparency I have Windows running on a VM for some apps that I can’t get in Linux)
Testing a normal Linux installation sounds like a good idea. In my opinion it’s better to transition to Linux than switch. That way you can go back to your previous system setup and see what you are missing or need without having to open your computer and swap hardware. If you can add the old or new SSD as an external drive and so that you can can boot then your plan might work out.
OP specifically said they don’t want to dual boot, and I honestly understand why they would say that.
When you dual boot you need to worry about what bootloader is in use and how it is set up. You might find yourself in a situation where you later decide to move fully to Linux and use the old Windows drive as storage but you can’t because if you wipe it then everything stops working.
Windows has even been known to destroy dual boot setups occasionally during Windows updates.
All very solveable if you have the right knowledge, but if you want to keep your life simple then swapping hardware has guaranteed safety (nothing can go wrong with the contents if a drive if it’s not plugged in, after all) and it’s very predictable and understandable.
That’ll work just fine. If you just want a test run, a LiveUSB is pretty sufficient for more things.
