I prefer duel boot will give the best performance. Vm next If you allocate enough resources from the host, however I tend to do things on both the host and vm at the sametime that makes both sluggish. Usb is slower when booting up and when having to write to usb drive due to usb write speeds. You could practice duel booting with a vm to get a better understanding of the partitioning phase of installation.
Install one system on vm, install another one on vm and select the different partition options on the installer to see what happens.

"but I'm scared of damaging the hard drive or messing up with W10"

This alone is your reason to use a VM.

Modern VM's are very very safe and easy to use. They offer easy ways to run at near native speeds.

I found a source for computers that does not put Windows on by default - I bought new with Mint only. Believe it or not there is life without Windows. On my old computer I completely wiped the hard drive and installed Mint on it. I'm still a newbie, but we (wife and I) do just fine with only Mint.

neither.

Why would I need to load a second Linux system?

I honestly think it depends upon what you are going to do with it. If you just need Linux to help troubleshoot a problem with a computer or something, use a live USB.

If you have a large enough hard drive, and you honestly use each OS you are installing half the time each and don't need to switch between them frequently, then use a dual boot setup.

If you spend most of your time on one OS but frequently need to switch to the other throughout the day because you NEED that one or two programs in the other OS, then install the lesser used OS in a virtual machine.

I personally use Linux Mint 90% of the time, but still need Windows for 3 different programs that won't work in Linux. So I run Windows in a VM.

I work for a small computer shop and we make most of our money by providing tech support to home users and SMB's who use Windows. A lot of our support business is system cleanups and virus removals due to the insecurity of Windows. However, we also sell computers and are a Dell reseller.

While most of the computers we sell still are Windows, we are selling more and more computers with Linux Mint as customers get more and more pissed off with Microsoft. So far, we've had a total of 1 customer who just couldn't acclimate to a new operating system and wanted to go back to Windows. Everyone else absolutely LOVES their Linux computers.

The money we lose by not having to sell Antivirus software and doing annual system cleanups, we make up for by selling in home Linux tutoring.

Good question. Actually I did this from time to time, mostly because I was eager to know other Linux distributions than the one I use everyday. Another reason is when a particular program isn't available, or incompatible with the main distribution. Sometimes just for the challenge and testing.

Another answer to that good question: to have different systems for different computer activities. For instance using one system for Internet banking and such things, another for visiting suspect sites like porn and game sites. Or maybe just for a writer or composer, or anyone in need for some discretion with their work, to have clearly separated systems or computers, and I would even recommend to these people the use of a separate computer which is never connected to any network. Rather obvious by the way ;o)

My base system is debian, but for games I have to boot ubuntu (and for others I must boot windows).

I boot multiple systems (usually at least 6, often as many as 12 or more) from a single system, and if space permits, as it has on my most recent system, I created multiple partitions of 10-20 GB size for each on large, modern disks - more if space permits. So not only DUAL booting, but booting a dozen different systems is possible, and as long as you occasionally back up your systems, even destroying partitions is not necessarily a deal breaker; just use removable media to boot your system, build or rebuild any broken partitions or boot media, and recovery is straightforward. It takes learning initially to do such things, but it doesn't require an advanced degree, just some learning about disk partitions and boot management.

Therefore I advocate booting more than one system from a hard drive, but it's also helpful to know how to use virtual machines, live systems that can help recover broken systems, and knowing multiple techniques gives you flexibility and freedom to use what you want and recover from virtually any potential catastrophe, especially coupled with a good backup and recovery strategy.

I prefer dual or multiboot. I typically have one Windows OS installed and one or more linux flavors installed including LFS (linux from scratch).

Regarding issues: I found if a new install and you want GRUB one way is to
Install Windows first, resize/adjust partitions to make room for linux and then install linux. This is because Windows will typically overwrite any other MBR bootloader during its install.

Hope that helps,

Tim

I became fed-up with the non-user friendly windows has become and decided to go over to linux mint. I still have windows10 as a dual boot option. The problem i have is, when i use mint everyday with kodi to watch tv, homevideos, pictures and music, surfing the web then i startup windows10. Windows10 takes a minute to launch then when it boots up i wait reboot go back into linux mint, all my hardrives are read only again. I have put in fstab the uuid and the rw switch. Could not change fstab because the filesystem was read only, had to put the rw option in grub then i could alter fstab again then I need to do ntfsfix and then i can write on the disks again. It is a bit strange to me why this occurs. Does it have to do with the partition being ntfs? I mean, does windows10 changes anything, so this is caused?

I do know something that stood out, the first time installing mint and putting all the hardrives into rw also the drive where windows10 is on could be set to rw. After the first time starting windows10 rebooting and back into mint, the drive no longer can put into rw because windows10 is hibernating, so it says in the commandline. But it is not. Strange things are happening in windows10. So could it be harmful to use ntfsfix on every boot? or is there a better way to keep the drives read/write in mint?

Hope that you are not trying to use a NTFS file system for your Linux system partition(s).
Don't let Windows hibernate (or whatever it calls it) - it must do a hard shutdown/startup each time you use it.

No Linux is on the same harddrive as windows10 but it has its own ext4 partition.

Afaik,Windows should never be on an ext# partitition or any partition at all. It should only be installed on an unformatted free space area of the drive.
This or some other install action may be part of the cause to your issue.
I do suspect a fault in the installation procedure somewhere.

Tim