Newbie: dual boot or emulator

[Michael Beechey]

Hello

I'm a complete newbie to a Mac, with a newish mini...wish I had done this years ago...spoooooky quiet!!!

I have used MSoft all my life and hated it....moved to Linux Mint 5 yrs ago, and love it, very zippy and runs like an OS should. However when it goes south it really goes south. and needs a lot of command line/terminal stuff...which I can't deal with when it doesn't work....Luckily there is an excellent forum

My question is about peaceful coexistence with Mac/Win 10. Sometimes I just could not find an app that worked on linux, so I always used a dual boot. Msoft being the bully it is, frequently trashed the linux partition, or took over the whole computer.

Can I set up a dual boot on the mini, with win installed only on an external drive?...or am I inviting further invasion by the adventurous mr. Gates?? Or should I run win in an emulator off the external drive and not have a dual boot?...seems safer....

newbie with no idea

THANKS IN ADVANCE!

 

[Lufbrarunner]

I do not think you can boot to windows on an external drive. Although I did do this a year or two ago LINK
When my wife needed access to windows 10, I used Bootcamp on her iMac and it worked very well indeed.
Parallels would be another option for you and would save rebooting each time you needed to swap operating system.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

It would depend on the Mac mini model, as the Apple Silicon M1 Macs cannot run Windows in Boot Camp or in a virtual machine emulation in Parallels/VMware Fusion.

If your Mac mini is an older Intel-based model, you can run Windows. You could actually use Parallels/VMware Fusion and store the virtual machine file on an external drive.

C

 

[Michael Beechey]

Hello and welcome.

It would depend on the Mac mini model, as the Apple Silicon M1 Macs cannot run Windows in Boot Camp or in a virtual machine emulation in Parallels/VMware Fusion.

If your Mac mini is an older Intel-based model, you can run Windows. You could actually use Parallels/VMware Fusion and store the virtual machine file on an external drive.

C

hillbilly work around?