Hey guys,
I use my laptop with a Windows 11 / Linux Mint dual-boot system.
Since I actually use Linux Mint 98% of the time, I wanted to ask if it is still necessary to do the system and security updates for Windows 11 as long as Windows is not needed?
If you are asking if not updating Windows will make your Mint system insecure, the answer is no. At least to me an exploit leveraging an unmounted Windows partition is unheard of. It will of course make your Windows system less secure for the 2% of the time you do use it. Another side effect of updating it is that it may break your dual booting.
What about those 2% days when you do need windows? Every time you boot to it, you’ll have gigabytes of updates waiting for you, which is seriously annoying. In order to do “just one thing real quick”, you’ll end up wasting an hour each time. I propose you make those days less infuriating, by booting up windows a bit more frequently.
Ideally, you would just uninstall it entirely, and use the disk space for Linux. Unfortunately, many people still have some ties that are difficult to break, so I totally get it why dual booting exists. If that one thing you do in windows doesn’t require much performance, you could also dedicate some old heap of junk laptop for it.
Or just ditch the Windows partition/drive and use a VM instead.
Really depends on how you intend to use Windows. Once upon a time I thought that was a great solution for communicating with an ancient piece of windows specific hardware. Turns out, you really need to keep that old W98 computer around unless you are willing to upgrade to new analysis hardware that costs about as much as a nice car. Home users probably never run into issues like this.
Just be aware that updating windows can cause your bootloader to change, so booting back into Linux might be a challenge. Note that I said might.
One thing to note, if you are using UEFI this is very unlikely to happen. It was designed from the start to have multiple boot options and Windows itself often has multiple entries. It is very rare for a Windows update to mess with any other boot options in UEFI.
During those rare times that you boot into Windows 11, go ahead and update it.
I wouldn’t go out of your way and boot into it for the sole purpose of keeping it updated tho.
It seems the other answers already covered what you needed to know, so I won’t be redundant here. Pro tip: if you rarely use your Windows installation, you might consider moving it into a virtual machine that you can conveniently boot from within your running Linux system. This way you wouldn’t need the dual boot anymore, which might be desirable for various reasons.
Put it in a VM, more flexible than dual boot. You can even just make a image of the partitions
cp /dev/nvmexx /path/to/part.imgand add it to the VM.
