The most essential component of a computer is its operating system. Why should you have to choose just one? To multi-boot or not multi-boot? That is the question.
Multi-booting
Dual-booting or multi-booting is the act of installing multiple operating systems on a single computer, and being able to choose which one to boot. The most popular combination is Windows / Linux although that may be starting to change with WSL2. More on that on a future post.
Why would you need to dual boot?
Well sometimes the apps or programs you need to use, perform better or are only available on a certain operating system. Take Adobe for example. If you need to use Photoshop or Illustrator your pretty much stuck with Windows or macOS. I know there are open source alternatives (ex: Gimp, Inkscape) but thats besides the point.
Sometimes theres a better operating system for the work your trying to do. From my experience Linux and or macOS provide a better and easier experience when it comes to development. Linux / macOS support most programming languages out of the box and their terminal apps are superior to the Windows command line. The popular Bash shell is available in macOS as well as most Linux distributions. The latest macOS version has switched to ZSH by default.
Why couldn't you just use a VM? I mean I guess you could but running an OS natively gives you full access to the host machine. If you plan on doing CPU or GPU intensive workloads it's better to go with a multi-boot setup instead.
My Personal Experience
My first dual-boot setup was macOS / Windows via bootcamp on an old Macbook Pro. Eventually I added Ubuntu but that just added complexity and problems. Somehow I got locked out of Windows and when I managed to fix Windows I lost access to grub. I got it working with rEFInd as my boot manager. I finally had the Holy Trinity of macOS, Windows & Linux.
I've spent alot of time playing around with multi-booting various operating systems. My current setup is from 2014. I'm still using rEFInd as my boot manager but I'm up to a penta-boot. Why I can't really tell you since I mostly just use one or two operating systems. Currently im running Windows 10, Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora and macOS. This pc started it's life like any pc with Windows. Then I turned it into a Hackintosh via the Clover EFI boot loader. Surprisingly I've had less trouble updating the Hackintosh partition compared to the Windows partition.
Conclusion
If your going to try and multi-boot your system I suggest you use different harddrives and not just partitions. It keeps things much simpler. You have a much less chance of overriding other partitions this way.
Eventually I will have to upgrade my computer and with AMD chips doing so well it might be an all AMD build. Will I multi-boot again? Maybe a dual-boot. I do want to give installing macOS via OpenCore a try.