TLDR; Anyone have experience to share about multi-booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu on a Mac Mini?
I increasingly need to reboot into Windows for some work I’m doing, and will need Win or Ubuntu for another project. I’m trying to (physically) segregate these projects away from my main work I’m doing on my iMac Pro.
Appreciate hearing about any gotchas you might have experienced (or even things that went smoothly).
Not much to it, just make sure you make 2 new partitions one for Linux and one for Windows.
If you don’t need all system resources consider using VMware Fusion or Parallels.
I strongly second this. It’s far less hassle and more or less Just Works
Thanks @MacExpert and @ACautionaryTale .
I have a hardware dongle that doesn’t play well with running in a VM.
I’d also like to move these projects to a different desk. I’m experimenting with having different locations to work on different things, hoping it will help with distraction.
While I agree that virtual is easier, if it HAS to be bare metal,
you can Boot Camp into Windows, and then use GRUB
(GRUB2 in the case of Ubuntu) and have both Windows
and Ubuntu available via Boot Camp.
(Just be careful not to dork the MBR partition with GRUB)
If the software is that important and cannot run in a VM, then I would use a designated Mac Mini or some older spare Mac to run Windows with no monitor and use MIcrosoft Remote Desktop to access it.
I cannot see how it can be practical to reboot your computer every time you want to switch operating systems and to have no way to share data live between the two operating systems.
I appreciate the responses, but I shouldn’t have added a “TLDR;”, folks aren’t reading my question and elaboration on the question 
therefore, thinking about buying an Intel Mac Mini.
That will work too 
BTW if you don’t need a lot of HP for Ubuntu, what about a Raspberry Pi?
Frankly, I’d recommend a used pc laptop rather than trying to shoehorn two foreign OS’s into your Mini. It’s easy to set one of these up for dual booting.
Great minds think alike!
Unfortunately the FPGA design software I want to run (Vivado) requires 64-bit Ubuntu (or Windows).
I also need a 64-bit environment for the code I’m working on in Visual Studio, the drivers for the data acquisition hardware, etc.
Yeah, a small desktop might do the trick.
I just hate the thought of buying PC hardware. When these projects are finished, I’m not sure if I’d still have use for PC hardware. (Although the FPGA stuff is probably going to stick as a hobby.)
Whereas if it’s a Mini, I could run macOS and feel at home.
Yeah, I’m with you there. But it seems (to me) to be the lowest-friction solution.
I have a home lab that includes two Intel Mac Minis running VMWare’s free ESXi Hypervisor. They host a handful of Linux (Ubuntu and CentOS) and Windows Server 2016 VMs. I like the size of the Minis and their quiet fans. They’ve also been realatively reliable.
Regarding hardware dongles, you can assign attached hardware to a VM in ESXi (I had to do this for a past project.) It worked well and survived VM reboots.
Considering buying a Windows-only machine? laptop or desktop. Can probably screen share, or not. Can be connected to your Mac’s via network.
This is what I did to run a proprietary (dongle req’d) app which was based on Microsoft Access et. al. Simplified a lot of of stuff and I could pay exclusive attention not to the technology but to the app.
I would also look into a dedicated windows machine, unless you have the intel Mac available to use. I have been considering something like this for myself. The new Windows 365 cloud offering is also very interesting for me, but you mentioned you need a dongle so it might not work for that.
Would it help to just use Windows online in their new Windows 365 online service?
Both virtualization and dual/triple boot have been fine for me on any Intel. Fan speed management on Windows during extended resource maximization has been my most challenging issue, but the drivers and third party tools have gotten better over time. I wouldn’t expect to spend any time worrying about it.
If pursuing a long-term project and not needing to ever boot into MacOS, I could see buying cheaper hardware from PC-land, but I’d stick to either small NUC-type PCs or used workstation hardware if you want more power. I have a Dell Xeon from ebay for such things that cost less than the RAM inside it goes for.
I’ve not much experience with using Windows, as I’ve never really found much use for it except for testing compatibility of websites back when IE wasn’t Chrome underneath. Nevertheless, I’ve had both installed on numerous Intel Macs without any issues. GRUB was easy to set up.
I used Linux extensively and it was excellent performance wise. I mainly used it for Docker and had no compatibility issues.
What’s the timescale for when these projects will finish? Intel Macs do not have an infinite shelf life at this point.