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?
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.
Another big plus of that approach: If your laptop or PC breaks, you can just move the VM image with Windows exactly like any other file you have backed up (you do backups, don’t you?) to the new hardware and use it as before. This esoecially breaks the problem of forced OS upgrades if the new hardware does not support the old windows version, or you do not have the installer and license keys any more, but the new Windows version does not support your old documents, media formats, or pheriperals like scanners.
Also, if you modify your Windows install and it might break, you can just make a snapshot of the VM image - which is a copy of a file - and restore it when needed.
You can legally buy second-market OEM licenses. They are not that expensive, and do not expire. And, older versions of Windows are much slimmer and boot much faster, though it is not a good idea to connect them to the Internet - instead, one would block connections between VM and Internet. Which is anyway much better from a privacy perspective.
But if the Windows has an OEM license, it can’t be used inside a VM, as far as I understand.
You can just use an activation script. Even though technically Windows won’t be activated using the OEM license in a VM, the license is still present on the machine. So legally Windows is still licensed. To get around the thing not automatically activating, an activation script is an easy fix.
This is a good activation script:
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
Legally, it’s probably not. The OEM desktop license probably doesn’t cover virtualization.
Legally it is. On their piracy audits Microsoft only counts the amount of licenses bought and the amount of computers using Windows. They do not care about how it is activated per each computer. They even offer big companies a way to host their own key management system to keep track of licenses they need to buy easier internally.