this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2026
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I’m currently dual booting Linux Mint and Windows. Love Linux, hate Windows. So why I am dual booting?

Because I own and use a Microsoft Zune HD.

It’s probably the best product Microsoft ever came out with. It’s so much lighter than my phone, it has a ton of my music on there, and it has an HD FM radio tuner. However, the software that runs it has never been released so there aren’t really any good options to try and manage the Zune on Linux (some people have tried, it doesn’t really work). So I keep a windows partition just so I can manage a 16 year old mp3 player and radio. That has to be the worst reason to keep a Windows partition, right?

(The reality is I would probably get rid of the Windows partition if I could, I’ve tried but something seems wrong with the BIOS on my computer idk I’m not a programmer. The Zune software is pretty janky at the point so uploading new music barely works anyway).

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[–] SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 14 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Zune was underrated. I had one and it was godly. I loved it more than the apple products at the time. It had so much potential!

Windows keeps trying to override grub or something. I had to reinstall grub once. Also windows keeps trying to update and reboot and fails. I have it for steam games.

[–] Weydemeyer@lemmy.ml 4 points 6 days ago (4 children)

It really is a great little device. I believe there has to be a market out there for a Linux device similar to it, something just for music / radio / podcasts.

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

You could look into devices supported by Rockbox, and the features of that firmware. I'm guessing it can sync files from Linux.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

How does nothing like this exist but open source?? I guess because everyone uses their stupid phone now, but i love having separate devices.

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Rockbox is the open-source.

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 2 points 6 days ago

There's a walkman model which is pretty much just that which runs some flavour of android but I don't know who they think their customer base is as the pricing is absolutely stupid. Top of the line model has gold plating and a nice 4k price tag. Also it apparently has 'oxygen free copper' and other audiophile bullshit, but no FM tuner.

And then there's a ton of similar products from China but no idea which models (if any) are actually useful.

[–] teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 days ago

Yeah, seems like there needs to be a distro made for retrofitting various phones or something with those features. Maybe even using the zune hw.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.ca 3 points 6 days ago

You might have one installed in UEFI mode and one installed in BIOS mode. That happened to me, and windows never played nice because of it.

[–] dRLY@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I have heard about how much more aggressive Windows has became since 10 with how it likes to fuck with partitions for certain updates. If using a desktop (or laptop that has two drive bays/slots) it might be safer to just have a small drive (or large if it is games) for Windows and a large main drive for Linux. Then you can just pick which one to boot at startup via the motherboard's hot-key. A VM makes more sense for most things, but if a dual boot is needed then two drives is safer.

[–] bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 2 points 5 days ago

I wonder who at m$ is in charge of the "make windows fuck up all other OSs present" department. Probably makes 800k/yr.