Dual boot Arch Linux and Windows the right way

A while ago, I wrote an article about how awesome it is to run Linux. Since then, a few people have asked me for a quick guide on how to do it. I use the Arch Linux wiki myself, but I find it intimidating for newcomers, so I decided to write a simplified guide. You will need two flash drives, a computer capable of UEFI booting and secure boot disabled.

What is dual booting?

Dual booting refers to the practice of having two or more operating systems living on your computer and choosing which one you’ll be working with for the current session. None of them have a clue about the existence of the other ones, so this makes for a great way to have different environments, like Windows for gaming and Linux for coding, for example. This is accomplished by a little program called the bootloader. It’s the first thing that runs when you turn your computer on. It sits at the very beginning of your hard drive and its only task is to look for any operating systems and launch them. If you’re used to working on Windows, this process is invisible to you, but there are many bootloaders out there that can launch both Windows, Linux, and depending on your hardware, macOS.

Why Arch Linux?

In a nutshell, bloat. I like an extremely lean environment made out of just the packages I want and Arch offers that. It comes with barely any packages and you have to install what’s missing yourself, so this lets you have an incredibly customizable system right from…