I am trying to install Fedora KDE 40 on my HP laptop alobside windows 11 on a 40 GB partition. for some reason, installation works fine but gts stuck at ‘Generating initramfs’ i cant see any other issues and USB access is fine. what could be going wrong?
Did you install from a ventoy USB? I had a weird issue recently where a system was doing something very similar - not a dual boot, just something I was slapping proxmox on. It appeared that a newer version of the ISO was doing something weird with the disk imaging when it tried to copy stuff from ventoy - I saw “ventoy” in some of the paths in the verbose logs on the post-install reboot. Slapping the install image on a bare USB drive and installing from there resolved the issue.
Tangentially: if you’re doing this as an evaluation… from personal experience, I’d just make a full backup of your system disk, then blast it and just make it a dedicated Linux box. Using the dual-boot crutch, in my experience, often devolves into basically just forgetting you even have the Linux partition because you rarely use it, and then a windows update will break grub or something like that, and you just don’t bother fixing it. Doing an actual OS migration is more work, sure, but it also forces you to actually use linux, and solving problems in that context is going to teach you a lot more than bailing out and rebooting into your windows part.
Also also: since you’re already down with KDE, check out kinoite (atomic F40 KDE). Atomic distros are awesome :)
And check out Aurora! It’s basically Kinoite with a lot of nice tweaks and inclusions. Aurora-dx is especially nice if you do dev stuff. I’ve been really happy with it.
The dual boot is simply there because I still on occasion need to use windows-only software. Otherwise, everything’ll be on Fedora. All I need to do is migrate some of my projects
And WINE and friends definitely won’t cut the mustard for you? Might be worth checking out, at least.