Hardware considerations for a new dual boot PC
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My understanding of what happens when using separate drives is that one drive is given priority in the BIOS/UEFI menu and then people just use the device menu when using the secondary drive. Windows really only cares about its own drive with this setup, so the bootloader on the other drive is safe. I've never actually done this myself since the only system I dual boot on is my laptop and it only has one drive installed. To answer your second question, I just use my bootloader (GRUB in my case) to select which OS I boot into.
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Windows ate my bootloader when upgrading from Vista to 7
Windows will eat the bootloader every time it updates the boot partition. Which generally isn't a whole lot of the time, but it's always a surprise, that's for sure.
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It doesn’t matter.
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No that doesn’t keep windows from changing anything.
Just learn how to repair your bootloader how your distribution wants it done and you’ll be fine.
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I'm guessing boot to a USB and run some kind of repair utility?
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Some distributions have that. Some have it built into the tools like arch. For some you just boot your installation media and run only the “install bootloader” step.
About the only universal way is to boot usb, pivot-root or chroot to switch to the installed system you wanna run and do grub-install, although you need to understand a few things about your system to not make errors.
Once you pick something to stick with, go ahead and look up its process. Think of it like practicing changing a tire in the grocery store parking lot before you actually need to do it on the side of the road.
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To add to this, I think in general AMD offers a bit better bang-for-buck at the moment, at least in the low and mid-tiers.
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I'd say CPU doesn't matter in terms of compatibility, but that AMD does have the edge at the moment on Intel in terms of performance, energy use, etc. Especially considering Intel's problems with their 13th and 14th gen Core CPUs.
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I know people have been investing a lot of work into getting Nvidia into a state where it Just Works, but if you don't need any fancy Nvidia features and are starting from scratch I'd honestly just recommend getting an AMD card just so you don't have to worry about it.
What games are you thinking of running and what resolution/frequency monitor do you have/want?
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If you install the Linux bootloader on the other drive with Linux, Windows basically just doesn't know or care that the it exists to bother writing over it. You can use UEFI to choose what to boot, but GRUB works fine with entries across different drives.
That said, it's not actually that hard to fix with a live USB if Windows does decide to eat GRUB on the same drive. I've been taking my chances on laptops particularly for years. So far, the only real problem I've run into was doing something stupid while dead tired and managing to nuke the Windows bootloader all on my own--somewhat ironically, while I was setting up another Linux distro to boot off a new drive! Which was also totally fixable, but a bigger pain than reinstalling GRUB would have been. (Especially with not being nearly as comfortable dealing with Windows stuff.)
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I play things like satisfactory, tf2, portal, doom stuff. But I am too old to play anything where reaction time really matters all that much. Like tf2 I only play mann vs machine now. My monitors are just 144hz. Nothing too fancy. Though I do have 2. And I forgot about VR. I want to get one, but I have no idea if linux supports them or how much the graphics card matters these days.
