Hello Everyone,
I know this is a very common question but I can't seem to find the appropriate answer for my specific case.

I just bought a laptop (Lenovo y520) with no operating system per-installed. I am mainly a Ubuntu user and I have a dual boot of Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows 10 on my old laptop.

As I don't have windows yet (I am about to start a post graduate course and I guess they will give me a windows installation) I want to start by installing only Ubuntu gnome 16.04..but leaving space for a later windows installation.

On my old laptop I only have an HDD so the dual boot installation was pretty straightforward. Now I have 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD on my new laptop and I have no idea what is the best way to do this in order to achieve maximum performance for both operating systems and assuming windows will only be installed later.

I read that for ubuntu the ideal is: root and swap should be installed on SSD and everything else on HDD. Is this correct?

Here are my questions (I am a complete newbie so some questions may not even make sense):

1) Is there a problem with starting with the Ubuntu installation? (I've read that ideally one should start by installing windows, because of problems with the boot loader)

2) When installing root on ssd, does this mean that programs will be installed on ssd too? (as I understand programs are installed on /usr)

3) The order I partition the SSD is important, right? i.e: Ubuntu then Windows is different from Windows then Ubuntu.

4) Could you perhaps suggest a partition scheme that achieves ideal performance for ubuntu? (this is my primary choice of operating system)

Thank you very much

How much RAM does your laptop have?

/boot/efi, /boot, /(root) and swap on ssd - I assume, that you have a EFI Bios.

It would be better to install Windows 10 first and then Ubuntu.

Yes I have EFI and 16 RAM so maybe not swap?

It is a bit hard to install windows first as I would have to wait until September to get University installation. Why not update grub after windows installation? Does not work?

Installing Windows after having installed Ubuntu will not be as easy, but you can work around the problem you will end up with.

Essentially, Windows install will ignore the fact that a linux distro with its own boot loader is installed and will prioritize its own bootloader in the ESP. So the next time you boot up your PC after installing Windows, it will boot straight into Windows (no GRUB).

Various tools exist to repair this (BootRepair, efibootmgr ...). You need to boot a live version of a linux distro, BootRepair's own live ISO, or some other rescue-type utility.

So if you can't wait, go ahead and install Ubuntu 1st, but understand what you'll be dealing with after installing Windows.

Cheers.

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How did you manage to get it without Windows? Also, was the price a little lower due to it not having Windows?

Regarding the hardware, does all of it work? Did it all work out-of-the-box or did you have to install drivers? Or was there any complicated setup involved?

I bought the laptop in Portugal and they had the option of buying it with no operating system. I guess that with windows it would have been roughly 100€ more expensive.

I have now finished my installation and everything seems to be working. No major problems to deal with.

This is what I did:
1) Change from RAID to AHCI. Otherwise Ubuntu wouldn't recognize my SSD and HDD.
2) Fixing wireless after installation with:
sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/ideapad.conf <<< "blacklist ideapad_laptop"
3) In my first installation there was a problem with graphics (I have NVidia GPU)..I guess the problem was
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...l/+bug/1559576
To solve this I installed everything from scratch and:

a) Installed xserver-xorg-legacy
b) sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/pp
c) sudo apt-get update
d) sudo apt-get install nvidia-375
e) After realizing that everything went smoothly and that the system was stable I just deleted all the graphics ppa to avoid any undesired updates that
could change my graphics configuration.

Regarding windows: In my old laptop I think I installed Ubuntu first and then windows and, as mentioned in a message above, it wasn't terribly bad to fix the boot situation. As I remember I just had to boot into a live cd and do a grub update.
Hope everything continues to work.
Thanks for all your replies

Forgot to mention the partition scheme:

SSD: 1) ESP partition: 200 MiB
2) /root: roughly 75GB (leaving the rest for windows)
HDD: /home and swap (with enough free space for a later windows ntfs filesystem)

Okay. I knew about the Wi-Fi and RAID issues from researching this laptop, but I didn't know about the graphics issue. Regarding Portugal, it seems like Portugal is particularly fond of FOSS, going by the fact that you were able to get that laptop without Windows (and saved 100 Euros as a result) and from stuff I've heard from Pedro Mateus on LWDW.

I'm not entirely sure if it's that common (most retailers sell it with windows as the only option).

I reckon the problem with graphics is just an issue with Gnome and gmd3. As far as I understand there are no problems with lightdm.

I'm happy with this purchase. For a fairly reasonable price I got an i7 7th Gen, 16 Ram, 256SSD + 1TB HDD. As I'll be mainly working and not gaming I didn't feel the need for an extremely powerful GPU

Partitioning scheme:

SSD:
Partition 1 - 500MB EFI partition (usually formatted FAT 32)
Partition 2 - NTFS partition for the future Windows installation
Partition 3 - ext4 for Ubuntu (I think 50 or 60 GB should be enough)
Partition 4 - swap (since you have lots of RAM, make one with 2GB just to avoid Ubuntu complain)
Then any other partition or free space you want.

HDD:
Partition 1 - 500MB EFI partition (this is not needed but do one just as a precaution, if anything happens to the SSD, you can fall back on this one)
Partition 2 - ext4 : this partition could be mounted at /home.
Then any number of partitions you see fit to organize your work/leisure.

Installation:
With a MBR system, I would strongly advise to install Windows first. But with UEFI, it is ok. I'll tell you why in a moment.

Make sure you know all the labels of your partitions very well. When installing Ubuntu, don't let the installer take control. Choose your partitions carefully. I also advise people to make several ext4 partitions on the SSD. Sometimes you can try other distros or put some backup there; you can even mount one of them at /opt and install some testing software there. Yes, software will be installed on SSD as /usr is there, unless you mount something else at /usr. But, it's ok to have software installed on SSD. It's faster .

Tell Ubuntu clearly that the bootloader should be installed on /dev/sda1 (EFI partition on SSD). Normally, Ubuntu will make a directory called ubuntu on the EFI partition and place the GRUB efi binary (grubx64.efi) there. Then it will automatically register it in the UEFI firmware settings for you. Then at next boot you will have grub in your bootloader list.

For your /home, check out this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Pa...ng/Home/Moving

Now before you will install Windows, make a backup of the ubuntu directory from the EFI partition first. Then install Windows, again pointing Windows to the appropriate partition on the SSD. I don't know if it asks where to install its bootloader, but I guess it should detect /dev/sda1 as EFI partition and automatically install and register its bootloader.

The advantage with UEFI is that you can have many bootloaders installed at the same time on the EFI partition. If Windows didn't mess up, its bootloader should be side by side with grub on the EFI partition. But Windows will have probably put its bootloader top of the list, so it will boot Windows first on next startup. Also, check if Windows switches Fastboot or Secure boot ON. Get into BIOS, turn these OFF if they weren't and move your GRUB bootloader top of booting priority. Then you can get in Ubuntu and run grub-mkconfig to generate a new grub.cfg with a Windows entry. Verify if Ubuntu places a copy of the grub.cfg on the EFI partition. Make sure both copies of /boot/grub/grub.cfg and EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg are identical.

That should do it.

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