I’m not in front of that computer right now, but as i recall, yes, you can select which drive to boot from when using UEFI mode, also you can set up boot order. If you’re using Legacy option, there’s no way to boot win11 - if i remember corectly.
And yes, i can also confirm it works with win10, also with windows7…i’ve had it set up like that before.
Only win11 creates problems in this regard.
Okay, there’s no hurry, it’s nothing urgent, i’ll wait for the new AV Linux version and try some setup options then.
Damn, I’ve been waiting for 9.3 so I can try out AVL or MX-Moksha 25.2. Ardour 9.4 just appeared so dreams are out the window. 
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I have not used GRUB to dual boot for years and also recommend using the UEFI boot menu to select which OS you want to load. On one of my machines, I press ESC when the ASUS logo appears to access the boot menu, but a different manufacturer might use F2 or some other function key. I have had no problems doing this with Windows 11 and Debian, but I also turn off Secure Boot in the BIOS menu. I think Debian can probably pass Secure Boot’s requirements, but that is mostly a guess. Old habits die hard, and turning it off at the BIOS level has never caused me a problem, so I go that route. When installing Debian, I don’t create an ESP partition, I let it use the one that is created during Windows’s installation, and it adds a “debian” entry in the UEFI menu with no fuss.
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Doesn’t look this thread is gonna end anytime soon anyway, so i will tell about my actual experiment:
I’m trying really hard for a week now to use Slackware. But i really only do that much (rather audio experiments than anything, mainly Ardour, VCVRack and seq24).
In general it works good.There is some usual problems Slackware offers for anyone, and some problems compared with the comfort debian based distributions offer for audio-production (mainly available packages). At least to me there is also some advantages, for most they won’t matter, i guess. (That is: the mentioned distributions for audio sure are a good choice, a very good one. Thats not my point. It is only “on a chat note”).
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Void Linux here as of last year, after using Linux Mint for about 10 years - but i now have a laptop with 16 cores, 6 of which are power/hyperthreading cores. A minimalist distro with zero microsuck-ish “helpful voodoo” going on in the background is the best for tweaking your system for good realtime audio performance. I’m very impressed by the performance gain i get from pinning IRQ’s and processes to specific cores for performance vs power-efficiency. I can now realtime-host & generate full audio of our whole band (5 or 6 instruments with lots of effects/processing) <EDIT: at 64x3 sample buffer/period size> with zero xruns, which was impossible to do with Linux Mint - at least not without breaking half the system.
I also still have Mint installed but it has become mostly a “rescue” system in case i break something in Void. I also sometimes chroot into the Mint userspace to use some programs like zoom, some games etc. or different versions/userspaces of stuff like Renoise or Ardour.
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Just in case I haven’t beat this poor dead horse to death elsewhere: for me, being able to record audio from a YT video into an Ardour session as a “reference track” is a killer feature: lots of times, I’m preparing to play the same song live, but want to be able to switch between various recorded versions to grok how the arrangements vary.
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Sometimes I do enjoy practising my singing to karaoke track on YouTube, so I don’t have to play piano at the same time. My solution is pipewire as jack client. I do need jack anyways for netjack2 which connects my ‘old’ laptop with a slimmed win11 (tiny11) for hosting windows plugins in carla there. That also doubled my RAM.
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Haha, the cap of death, as it is called elsewhere!
Well, I’m still with 8.2, which works great apart from the occasional hickup.
BTW, the issue of the log reporting “wrong source port” after import of foreign-generated audio files really seems to be solved or rather, worked around by changing left and right channels in the connection manager window. No more red light and complaining after that, and no freezes caused by the poor thing entering an enternal loop.
I’d recommend a distro that won’t be doing age verification or attestation. Things like Artix, Vendefoul Wolf, Garuda, EndeavourOS, Void, Devuan, Omarchy, CachyOS, Slackware, Zorin, MX, Solus, and Alma aren’t doing it.
The big distributions will do it because of enterprise recognition (and potentially surveillance infrastructures I won’t get into), which is highly unfortunate.
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I don’t think recommending distros based solely upon their vocal opposition to age verification laws is helpful. Given no distros have implemented any age verification mechanisms yet, their positions on the matter have no practical effect. It is merely a political talking point at present that shines no light on their merits, and it is probably best to set aside the issue until it actually creates technical differences that affect users.
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I like CachyOS, which is based on Arch. Cachy has extra (kernel) optimizations and it is compiled with modern compiler options, making it up to 15% faster than other distro’s in different benchmarking tools.
It has a very well maintained user repository for packages (AUR) and it is a rolling release distro, meaning it updates to newer versions of packages as soon as they are out of the internal testing branch.
For example: Ardour 9.5 is already available: Arch Linux - ardour 9.5-1 (x86_64)
It is however a distro best suited for the more advanced Linux user.