I’ve heard dual booting Linux and Windows isn’t a good idea because Windows Update will nuke the Linux boot loader, so I’ve avoided doing that.
For a very long, technical, and complicated reason, I still need Windows because one piece of software that I absolutely MUST have is only compatible with Windows. No, there is no alternative software available for my use case; none, zero, not any, at all. I’ve already tried running it within many different VMs, using many different hypervisors, and I’ve already tried Wine; they aren’t an option, the software isn’t stable in those cases. I don’t want to get in the weeds about it, so please just accept that I NEED some version of Windows installed.
Since Windows 10 doesn’t receive updates anymore, can I dual boot Linux and Windows 10 without worrying about whether Windows Update will break anything? I intend to keep Windows on one drive and Linux on another. Windows would only be used when I need to run this one specific program, which is maybe five or ten hours per week. The rest of the time, I’d be using Linux.


I had my bootloader nuked when I dual boot with different drives. And that is when I nuked windows.
I think the only way to make sure is to completely disable windows update (as windows update sometimes also handles drivers uefi etc, not just windows), and that is known to be hard
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/bringup/windows-uefi-firmware-update-platform
https://support.microsoft.com/en-US/Windows/Hardware/Drivers/automatically-get-recommended-and-updated-hardware-drivers