How Does Dual Booting Windows and Linux Work with Disk Space?

Just a heads-up, in a dual boot setup, both operating systems will share the EFI partition, so make sure to back that up before any updates. If something goes wrong, it's much easier to restore from a backup than to fix the partition manually. Also, while Linux can access NTFS partitions, it’s better for occasional file transfers rather than regular use.

You absolutely need to create different partitions for each OS. First, if your whole disk is formatted as NTFS, you'll need to shrink your Windows partitions to make some space. Once that's done, you can create the partitions for Linux, which will be formatted differently. I suggest at least 40GB for Linux to ensure you have enough space for everything.

Definitely back up your important data before you start messing with partitions! Use Windows Disk Management to shrink your C: drive and leave some unallocated space for Linux. During the Linux installation, be careful to choose manual partitioning so you can set up everything correctly: a swap partition, a home partition, and a root partition. Debian 13 is a great choice for beginners, too!

When you dual boot, Windows and Linux will have separate spaces on the disk, which are called partitions. They can't share applications since they use different file systems. If you want to use Windows apps on Linux, you can try Wine, but it’s not ideal to run Windows apps from the NTFS partition because it might lead to issues down the line.