Hi there, im just new with rocky linux and linux actually in general. I was using ubuntu and centos 7, and i wanted to install rocky linux.
Please help me out how to install rocky linux alongside windows? Thanks a lot.
Hello. You can check this.
Those instructions have lots of good tidbits, but unfortunately they also take the shortcut of telling the user to disable Secure Boot in UEFI settings because it may “complicate” things, like it certainly may.
However, as far as I’ve understood, Windows 11 pretty much requires Secure Boot to be enabled. There apparently are some workarounds or hacks to disable it with Windows 11, but who knows whether those hacks will keep working in the future, if MS makes the requirement even more strict.
Also, another assumption in this article is that the Windows installation is not using encryption (BitLocker). While that may be true for almost all home users, many use Win 11 Pro and have BitLocker enabled.
The good news is that Rocky Linux 9 can be installed beside such Windows 11 installation with secure boot and BitLocker enabled, as I’ve done so successfully myself. I think one thing you may have to do though is to manually create a new separate /boot/efi/ partition for Rocky Linux (I think 50MB or 100MB is quite enough for such partition, mine is 100MB and only 7% of it is used).
I think Linux Mint and Ubuntu can also be installed with Secure Boot enabled, but they don’t seem to like Windows having BitLocker enabled at least during installation. Not sure if one can just create a separate /boot/efi for Mint/Ubuntu, I tried and ended up with an non-bootable machine. Maybe some extra steps would have been needed, with Rocky Linux it went semi-automatically afterwards.
Then there certainly are Linux distros like Manjaro which strongly suggest you should disable Secure Boot before the installation. Not sure if it is a hard requirement or if there is a way to keep it enabled, some extra manual steps needed.
So all in all, RHEL/Rocky Linux seems to be among the easiest to install beside Windows, even in tricky setups like with secure boot and BitLocker enabled.