.

VMs won’t do for long, because you won’t have proper acceleration as it’s required by gfx apps like Lightroom. Sure, they’ll work, but you’ll experience slowdowns. You can run accelerated VMs, but I find them buggy.

If you’re going to dual boot, you should install Linux on a separate DRIVE, not just a partition, and install the bootloader on that second drive. You force Linux to do that by disabling in the BIOS the Windows drive first, before installation. Then, you re-enable it again. Then you can choose what to boot at using F12 during boot time. If you put them on the same drive, Windows will eventually overwrite the bootloader.

The ideal thing is to actually move to Darktable. https://mathiashueber.com/migrate-from-lightroom-to-open-source-alternative/