The way you've responded to help, I'm surprised that anybody would want to get involved, but I'm going to give it a try. The last time I tried to set up a dual-boot with Windows was a couple of decades ago, and I learned my lesson back then.
I do use Solus for nearly everything, but there are just a couple things I need to do on Windows, because there's no Linux version of the software. One is to operate my label maker, and the other is to read Nook ebooks when I get bored.
Solus is the only OS that's installed on my laptop's SSD, so it has no argument with Windows. I run Widows 10 (quite well, as it turns out) in a virtual machine created by VirtualBox, which is free, and in the Solus repository. That VM is more than capable of doing anything that I need done in Windows.
VirtualBox is free for personal use, and it's available for both Linux and Windows. I'd suggest you decide which is your primary OS (or needs the most resources), and install VirtualBox there, and then create a VM to run your secondary OS. As I mentioned, for me the primary OS is Solus, as that's where I spend almost all of my computer time, so that's where VirtualBox is installed. Windows 10 is on one of my VMs.
This approach has a great many advantages over trying to make a dual-boot with Windows work right, especially if two OSs are on the same SSD or HDD:
- The two OSs can't fight with each other. Each has its own disk drive, albeit a virtual disk drive in the case of the VM.
- Instead of saving your work and shutting down one OS in order to start the other, the primary OS and the VM run simultaneously. A common tactic is to launch the VM in its own virtual workspace, while the primary OS runs software in the others. Changing from one OS to the other then simply requires a click of the mouse, not a reboot.
- With a single keypress, the VM can be toggled between full-screen or a smaller window. When the VM is at full-screen, its user experience is identical to that of the host machine.
- Using VirtualBox, the host machine and the VM can share the clipboard, use a shared drive, and share drag-n-drop. Communication between them is easy. It's much harder to do when you need to stop one OS in order to use the other.
- You're not limited to just one secondary OS. I currently have eight available. And if the host machine is strong enough, you can even run more than one VM at a time.
- Backing up a VM is trivial. You just take a snapshot whenever you've made important changes to anything on it. That's another operation that just needs a mouse click (in the VM manager). You can return to a previous working snapshot any time your VM runs into trouble.
I probably haven't thought of all the advantages to using VMs, those should be enough to show you why I haven't created a dual-boot installation in a very long time. If you already know all this, then I'm sorry if I've wasted your time. It's possible that this explanation might help others who are frustrated with their attempts to dual-boot with Windows.