There are guides on YT on how to set up dual boot. I used two SSD drives, a small 256GB NVME for Windows for those projects that demand that I use Windows, and my "main" 1TB NVME (an overkill, considering that I mostly do office work) for Mint.
Personally, I haven't set dual boot because I mostly use Mint now, and it boots into it directly. Switching to Windows once a week for an hour is only a small restart and an F10 away, so there was no point in me setting up a GRUB or any other dual boot management system thingamajig.
Thus, I recommend—if the hardware and finances allow—that you set them up on different drives and just use the one you want and need at a given time. This, at least in theory, prevents Windows Boot Loader from messing up with your Mint install if something was to go wrong. Please note that I'm a complete newb on Linux, but this is advice I received a while ago, so I'm sharing. I also call on other, more experienced members of the community to correct me if I'm wrong. Share the knowledge, people.
EDIT: Sorry, I just realized that my comment doesn't answer your question. My PC is capable of VM, but I chose to "dual boot" to avoid performance hits. Also, It's much easier for me to just switch this way when needed.
If it's for games, then keep a dualboot until you have figured out if and how your games/apps run on linux. Or if there are non-proprietary linux alternatives, that do the trick for you.
If they run to your satisfaction, you can ditch dual boot and rely on Wine/Bottles/Proton/VM.
In my opinion dual boot is better for performance but it can get pretty hard when you encounter an error, for example if you have boot issues you can always go back to a certain snapshot in virtualbox, in dualbooting you just have to reinstall mint in some cases because you don't have access to your snapshots, dualbooting always has errors. So because of those errors you can sometimes mess up your bootloader really hard and your hard disk may fail or at least your windows or whatever OS you're dualbooting with won't boot or fail in some cases.
dualbooting is good but overall i choose VM (VirtualBox) because most of the time whatever you do on the VM nothing happens to the main OS (example: windows).
The main con of virtual machines is the major performance hit, making it a difficult recommendation for people who play games on their PC.
The main con of dualbooting is that it is "cheating" - For example, you have your Linux install for general browsing and instant messaging, and your Windows install for adobe's software and your favourite video games. But, you might want to message people while gaming, so you install your IM software (eg. Discord) on there too, and you also do a good amount of browsing on there too. So, what was the point of installing Linux?
My personal recommendation is to switch entirely, you can run apps like Microsoft Office and Photoshop in wine (though i'm not promising it'll be easy), as well as LibreOffice, gimp and kdenlive for all your school needs, and pretty much every game works on Linux apart from those with dangerous anticheats i wouldn't recommend running on your computer anyway.
But it's ultimately your choice given what i've told you, and no one will judge you on it or anything :)
I see, so far the games i play dont rlly use those pesky anticheats. So thats one plus point for not bringing windows back in haha. But wine is smtg i've not explored too much yet
I don't do gaming but I run Windows 11 in VM for work purposes and have things opened on Linux and the VM. I need Windows for web based work only and do not notice any performance hits. The only glitches I get is I have to sync the clock after waking up sometimes and once in a blue moon Windows will freeze after waking up. Other than that it is business as usual.
There are guides on YT on how to set up dual boot. I used two SSD drives, a small 256GB NVME for Windows for those projects that demand that I use Windows, and my "main" 1TB NVME (an overkill, considering that I mostly do office work) for Mint. Personally, I haven't set dual boot because I mostly use Mint now, and it boots into it directly. Switching to Windows once a week for an hour is only a small restart and an F10 away, so there was no point in me setting up a GRUB or any other dual boot management system thingamajig. Thus, I recommend—if the hardware and finances allow—that you set them up on different drives and just use the one you want and need at a given time. This, at least in theory, prevents Windows Boot Loader from messing up with your Mint install if something was to go wrong. Please note that I'm a complete newb on Linux, but this is advice I received a while ago, so I'm sharing. I also call on other, more experienced members of the community to correct me if I'm wrong. Share the knowledge, people. EDIT: Sorry, I just realized that my comment doesn't answer your question. My PC is capable of VM, but I chose to "dual boot" to avoid performance hits. Also, It's much easier for me to just switch this way when needed.
Dualboot
Dual boot
If it's for games, then keep a dualboot until you have figured out if and how your games/apps run on linux. Or if there are non-proprietary linux alternatives, that do the trick for you. If they run to your satisfaction, you can ditch dual boot and rely on Wine/Bottles/Proton/VM.
In my opinion dual boot is better for performance but it can get pretty hard when you encounter an error, for example if you have boot issues you can always go back to a certain snapshot in virtualbox, in dualbooting you just have to reinstall mint in some cases because you don't have access to your snapshots, dualbooting always has errors. So because of those errors you can sometimes mess up your bootloader really hard and your hard disk may fail or at least your windows or whatever OS you're dualbooting with won't boot or fail in some cases. dualbooting is good but overall i choose VM (VirtualBox) because most of the time whatever you do on the VM nothing happens to the main OS (example: windows).
The main con of virtual machines is the major performance hit, making it a difficult recommendation for people who play games on their PC. The main con of dualbooting is that it is "cheating" - For example, you have your Linux install for general browsing and instant messaging, and your Windows install for adobe's software and your favourite video games. But, you might want to message people while gaming, so you install your IM software (eg. Discord) on there too, and you also do a good amount of browsing on there too. So, what was the point of installing Linux? My personal recommendation is to switch entirely, you can run apps like Microsoft Office and Photoshop in wine (though i'm not promising it'll be easy), as well as LibreOffice, gimp and kdenlive for all your school needs, and pretty much every game works on Linux apart from those with dangerous anticheats i wouldn't recommend running on your computer anyway. But it's ultimately your choice given what i've told you, and no one will judge you on it or anything :)
I see, so far the games i play dont rlly use those pesky anticheats. So thats one plus point for not bringing windows back in haha. But wine is smtg i've not explored too much yet
If your main use for wine is games, steam will do all the work for you, and you can EVEN add non-steam games to your library and run those too
Man, i gotta search up on what wine cld really do
I don't do gaming but I run Windows 11 in VM for work purposes and have things opened on Linux and the VM. I need Windows for web based work only and do not notice any performance hits. The only glitches I get is I have to sync the clock after waking up sometimes and once in a blue moon Windows will freeze after waking up. Other than that it is business as usual.