Installing Linux alongside Windows isnt very difficult. But some distros are easier to install than others. Im not a Debian user nor an expert in writing guides or providing remote assistance (hypothetically if I was there in person I could probably install it for you, tho
) so...this is at
your own risk; but having installed several Linux distros alongside Windows over the years, I can assure you, its not
that hard to do.
Without further blabla, an approximate step-by-step
- Backup your data. Make sure you have Windows installation media in case this goes wrong.
- Double-check if you backed up your data.
- Check your BIOS to see if you have Secure Boot enabled. You will need to disable it for the time being. Make sure your USB drive is higher in priority than your hard drive.
- Download the Debian installation medium, write it to a USB stick. Make the USB stick bootable, you can do that with - for example Rufus or Balena Etcher.
- Try booting from the stick. It should boot into a Debian live environment where you can try stuff out.
- Once youre in Debian, you should have an install option on the desktop. This should guide you through the process and have an option to install alongside Windows.
- When it asks you where to install, you can either partition a drive, or use the whole spare SSD for Linux, this what you want in this case. Just make sure you dont overwrite Windows if you dont want to.
You can format your spare SSD in ext4 or btrfs (I always use ext4 and have little experience in using btrfs). Make sure you allocate enough space for the OS and the home drive when setting it up. The home drive is where all your data goes, the OS side is where you install programs (Steam generally installs games to the home drive). I do not know if Debian auto-suggests how much should go where. There' also be partitions for grub and swapfiles.
This step can be the trickiest, I think
- Debian should set up the bootmanager grub so you can select which OS to boot each startup; and once you boot, grub should have options for default OS etc. Windows updates can mess up grub in the future, keep that in mind.
You can alternatively download the USB ISO without the live environment, but the installer seemed a bit more unfriendly.
I need to stress that some of this, especially steps 6 and 7, is anecdotal from my previous experience with other Linux distros like Ubuntu. Debian might be different, and I myself am using Manjaro for a while now (and, SteamOS, where I'm writing this
).
Sooooo ... honestly, its probably better to watch a tutorial on Youtube where people know Debian better than I do.
Or, if you have an old spare computer, to try it out there first. I managed to mess up my first couple of Linux installations....but that was the mid-2000s, and it should be more robust now
